The Year of the Hare

The Year of the Hare is one of the few Finnish literary works known in other countries, where it is often marketed as a picaresque novel with environmental themes. It was originally published in 1975 and is now available in translation in 18 languages. According to the edition I read, the book is a best-seller in France, where it has “acquired a higher intellectual status” than in Finland.

This is the story of Vatanen, an unhappy journalist who hits a hare whilst driving with a colleague in the countryside. He leaves the car and runs into the forest in search of the injured hare. Suddenly he loses all interest of going back to the city. He does not go back to the car and his colleague drives off. Some days later he calls his wife saying he is not coming back (“cry quicker, or the call will get expensive”) and starts a journey through Finland with the hare, taking up a series of jobs and having many adventures on the way.

Approximate route of Vatanen’s trip. Bing Maps

His actions are never explained. It is hinted that the decision to drop out was due to his dissatisfaction with consumerism. He recalls how difficult it was to move around inside his flat which was full of “clumsy modularized furniture”. He was also unhappy with his role in the production system, which he consider to be no more than processing information into a digestible form for the masses, something very different from his dream of interviewing “some misrepresented person, ideally someone oppressed by the state”. The journey allows him to achieve freedom.

As he travels, he starts to notice and appreciate the natural environment, in contrast with his attitude while driving with his colleague, when the landscape was slipping past their eyes unnoticed. As he ventures deeper into the wilderness, he also starts to value the peaceful and quiet surroundings. The disruption caused by humans to this peace and quiet is evident in a scene where a bulldozer comes rumbling at a lakeside camp, frightening children and cows. However, in this book the wilderness also seems to be a man’s world, which women occupy only to add to the scenery (“Irja look marvellous, sinking into the cool forest mere with her sumptuous breasts”).

Religion does not seem to have an important place in Vatanen’s new life. He takes a nap in a village church while the hare sniffs the flower arrangements and drops “a few innocent pills in front of the altar”. But then he meets a man who couldn’t find hope in Lutheranism, Russian literature, Buddhism, or Anarchism and finally found it in ancient Finland culture, which he considers the true religion of “a true Finn” (decades before this expression was appropriated by Finland’s racist- homophobic party). For that man, it is impossible to practice religion in the cities, because its rites have to be celebrated in the wild. This rites seems to involve the sacrifice of animals like the hare, which he proceeds to kidnap.

The book raises several issues about the relationships between humans and animals. Is it domestication the best way to care for animals? Vatanen receives a permit to retain the hare from the Game Preservation Office on the grounds that he took charge of it when injured, but police wants to confiscate it and let it out in the forest. The hare recovers 300km into the trip but Vatanen then treats it as a travelling companion.

As the book progresses, Vatanen becomes more aware of the ugliness of other people’s behaviour towards animals. This happens for example when he comes across a group of foreign military attachés walking in the woods searching for a bear: “What we want is, first, to get a good look at it, photograph it, you know, and film it. Then shoot it.” Vatanen feels ashamed to join this group, as he recognises that he had never hunted purely for pleasure. He also feels depressed when, back in the city, he sees an old Santa Claus giving a “nasty kick on the hoofs of a tired reindeer and the reindeer surrounded by squalling children trying to get on its back”, and he confronts a scientist who performs vivisection. (“That’s science. Nor is it your concern. It’s my profession”).

The contradiction of treating some animals as pets and others as food is always latent. In a group, Vatanen is asked if he intends to eat the hare when it is fully grown. He says he has no such intention and others agree that no one would kill his own pet. But at the same time, he also devours big portions of beef and pork, because in Helsinki he “usually had difficulty in coping with breakfast, but now the food tasted marvellous”. Later on, it is revealed that the main dish in a party organised by Vatanen is hare, which creates an awkward situation.

The book also deals with people’s attitudes towards the environmental concerns of others. Vatanen’s actions are often met with incomprehension. A girl asks him if he’s not a criminal because he is coming out of the forest. Later on he knocks at a house and the owners call the police and he is arrested for vagrancy because he is wandering aimlessly, so he might be a danger to the community (“he hasn’t even got a car”). Ironically, the National Institute of Veterinary Science in Helsinki is the only place where he isn’t stared at for carrying a wild animal.

Life in the wilderness is not easy and loving animals can be a heavy load. He maintains that anyone can live that life provided they had the nous to give up city life and trust on their instinct of self-preservation. But other scenes also show his vulnerability in the natural world. In fact, he is only able to lead a life on the road because he relies on the generosity of strangers. For example, on a snap decision he jumps out of a bus just before it starts to rain and then has to beg locals to put him up for the night.

Vatanen often acts on instinct, which is probably a way for the author to remind us that humans are also part of nature. He also behaves irrationally in many occasions. He befriends a moonshiner and the more he drinks the less interest he feels in the forest fire that surrounds them. His love for animals also seems to apply only to cute leverets and calves, not to adult animals. He sets a trap for a raven and recognises that “there was enough cruelty in him to laugh out loud at his foul play”. He also goes on after a bear for several hundreds of km in Soviet Russia just to kill him. In the end, he is charged with several crimes, including cruelty to animals, hunting protected animals, and retaining a protected wild animal.

The book is an easy read, as it is made up of 24 short and entertaining chapters. The author does not push his message too hard. However, the flow of the narrative is disrupted by a huge gap in chapters 19-20, where unexpectedly Vatanen wakes up 170km from the last scene and with no recollection of how it ended up there.

The Year of the Hare was adapted to film in 1977 by Finnish director Risto Jarva. Unlike the book, the film shows Vatanen’s pre-hare life in Helsinki, and how he wants to abandon his “classy, trend-maker, confident, active, highly streamlined” persona. He also has more explicit concerns about issues like greenhouse gas emissions and nuclear waste. His evil side is not shown and the contradictions in his behaviour are less obvious, although he seems to have a tendency to express that he rejects material things by throwing them into the wild, including his necktie, a deodorant can, and a radio. There are nice shots of the Finnish wilderness but also hilarious scenes, when a tour guide asks him to act the Finish man from the wilderness to please foreign tourists.

For some reason, thirty years later, somebody thought it was a good idea to make another film version of the book, called “Le Lièvre de Vatanen”, a French, Belgian, and Bulgarian co-production filmed in Canada. Here, Vatanen is not wandering but goes to places where he knows family and friends. On the way he gets involved with a woman (just an excuse to show breasts on film) and has many adventures when he is invariably saved by the hare. A mess.

The Year of the Hare is an interesting story of human beings trying to relate with the natural world, in the vein of Aleksis Kivi’s Seven Brothers, another Finnish classic. The question raised by the book about the challenges of considering animals as friends and not as food are also explored in “Lamb“, a recent film focusing on a very different setting, that of contemporary rural Ethiopia.

Ecosocialism – fracking, climate and revolution

The Ecosocialism conference was held in Central London yesterday. It was organised by Socialist Resistance (“Ecosocialist, Feminist, Revolutionary”) and RS21 (Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century). This post is a report on the main issues discussed in three of the sessions.

In the opening plenary, Alan Thornett (speech, video) said that Marxism in terms of ecology did not have a good 20th century. It should have a better 21st Century, otherwise it will become irrelevant. Many Marxists failed to realize the importance of climate change even when it had become evident in the end of the 20th Century. Workers’ movements have rarely questioned the products made in factories, some of which are “weapons of mass pollution”. The environmental crisis is now the bigger crisis facing humanity, and interacts at all levels with the economic crisis.

One of the workshops, with Sean Thompson (Left Unity) and John Cowsill (RS21), was about Marx and Ecology. There is an idea that Marx left nature alone. He never had a concept of nature that exists outside of man. Marx’s writings about topics such as agriculture also were never more than a sketch. William Morris was one of the first to further Marx’s work on ecology, but not many others have followed him. Marxist ecology was only rehabilitated in J. B. Foster’s 2000 book (“Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature”).

Capitalism has always treated the world as a dustbin. So companies now drill underneath people’s land and spoil the pristine environment of the Arctic to exploit more resources from the planet. The environment is a “free gift”, just like the unpaid labour of workers – a better-known Marxist idea. The growing popularity of renewable sources such as solar power in Germany and wind power in Denmark is not good news for capitalism as it may cause the price of energy to go down. So ecosocialism is an important part of the vision for society held by Marxists. The environment should be regarded as a human right (objective for example of the current Eradicating Ecocide campaign).

Reshaping society also involves questioning wants and needs. The solution to global environmental problems may be for people to consume less. In the open plenary Natalie Bennett suggested that if working hours are reduced and basic income guaranteed, then people don’t have to worry about their income going down, and have time to do what they like to do, shifting their priorities from consuming to producing.

The green movement then goes to the heart of consumer culture, which is ingrained in society, as 94% of Japanese adult women now own a Louis Vuitton bag [although that number is wrong and anyway now they are more interested in “green luxury” products]. Capitalism generates false needs and consumerism is a form of social control – the thesis of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man.

There is a perception of the green movement as a group of sandal wearing, fruit juice drinkers. People do start with vegetarianism and organic gardening, but then feel the need to get the green message across. Capitalism is good at mobilising at global level. The green movement can campaign at the local level, but it is always the global nature of capitalism that is at stake. The movement needs to find roads to people’s consciousness, and take advantage of the fact that there are many people opposed to activities such as fracking. There is a need to create a positive programme and lay off the doomsday stories, because they have a negative impact.

Many of these issues were also mentioned in the workshop about transport. John Stuart talked about the environmental impact of aviation. Only 5% of people of the world flies, what would happen if the other 95% started flying? At the same time, many cities are like a vision of hell, bisected by motorways and full of car traffic. But economic globalisation cannot happen without cheap flights. And what profits are there if people go to work by bicycle and not by car, or if railways are not in private hands?

Fundamental changes are needed, and these changes will not happen in a capitalist system. In a socialist transport system, the car would be…socialized, that is, shared and collectively owned. At the same time, workers should be the key for the transformation of the transport industry and planning system.

Once again, the green movement needs to start speaking in ways that relate to people. People support positive change. Instead of saying “we want fewer cars in the world”, it should say “we want less pollution and noise and more scope for children to play outside, the ability to cross the road safely and get around the city without congestion. And cycling and walking have health benefits (one of the participants said it even makes people look better).

But to reduce travelling is to shrink the boundaries of people’s worlds. The chance for people to visit other parts of the world can be progressive, empowering the working class. So transport should be regarded positively, but critically. The objective could be to promote modal shift and challenging the motivations for using cars. Shower facilities at work encourage bicycle commuting. Improvements in pedestrian safety may reduce the use of cars for school runs, as parents now feel that roads are too dangerous for children to walk alone. The reduction of working hours mentioned before would also have an impact, as people would have more time to spare and choose slower, but more environmentally friendly, modes of transport.

Just changing transport is not enough to build a vision of a future. Improvements in travel speed have fragmented urban communities. This type of development must be challenged, to reduce the need for travelling. Cars are also engrained the social psyche, they are means of transport but also of personal identity. The green movement must build on the fact that many people actually hate the time spent inside their cars and having to spend so much for maintaining them.

Are you implying that my acorn brew isn’t as good as Nescafe?

Another post about eco-anarchism and the limitations of communal living and alternative technology as vehicles for social change. In contrast to the story of the last post, based on true events following the Portuguese 1974 revolution, the story one in this post is fictional and was originally told as a graphic novel.

Cliff Harper is a British illustrator with many publications about political ecology and anarchism. Among other work, he drew six “visions” of a post-revolution future, which were published in a volume called Radical Technology, organised by the same people who edited Undercurrents, the magazine of radical science and alternative technology mentioned in my last post. The drawings are representations of the social context of radical technology and are meant to be “pictorial theses” to be taken further, “first in the head and then in the fields and streets” [Boyle et al. 1976]. The editors of the book say that although utopian, the visions “could be implemented now if sufficiently large groups of people got themselves together”.

The drawing below, number 3 in the series, is the vision of the “autonomous housing estate” (copy from here). The others five are the “collectivised garden”, “basement workshop”, “autonomous terrace”, “community workshop” and “community media centre”. The autonomous housing estate would be located in a rural area and its dwellings would be independent of grid services. Some services, like heating and waste treatment, would be provided at the household level and others, like electricity, water and gas, would be provided at the community level. The drawing shows how the village produces its energy, using devices such as a solar panel, a windpump, a wind generators and a methane digester.

In another book (Class War Comix – New Times), Cliff Harper shows us some of the things that can go wrong when those “large groups of people got themselves together” and move from the city to the country to create an eco-anarchist utopia. The story is inspired in his own experience of living communally in a rural area in 1972. This is the first and only chapter of a graphic novel that was meant to run for six volumes. It was republished in the USA in 1979, a version which is now available online in libcom.org. It is also one of the works exhibited in the Comics Unmasked – Art and Anarchy in the UK exhibition which is in London until 19 August 2014. Let’s hope this exposure increases interest in this interesting book.

The story is set is the post-revolution future, in one of the many rural communes that have grown up in the UK. The characteristics of these communes are implicit in the story, but given in more detail in the author’s preface to the UK edition and afterword to the US edition.

The communes were made up of around 2,000 people and were collectively run. They were either self-sufficient in terms of food production and provision of other needs, or fulfilled a specific function, co-operating with all others communes for mutual benefit. Planting and sowing were done by hand but machinery was also used at other stages of production. Nevertheless the communards worked “with a humble respect for the earth and its mysteries” and used organic methods because they were “concerned that their efforts do not destroy natural systems” [Harper 1974]. As in the vision of the autonomous housing estate, energy came from sustainable sources: windmills produce electricity and human and animal waste was decomposed to produce methane gas.

So it all looks like a romantic country idyll.

But we soon learn that all is not as it seems. Some elements of the commune want to go back to the city because “it is in the city that the direction of the revolution is being determined”. Others want to go back simply because that is “where the action is”.

Some of the conflicts are caused by different opinions about consumption, some members being fully satisfied with what the local economy provides, while others miss the products provided by the less ecological and less equalitarian global market.

Other conflicts are caused by different opinions about production, as the communards discover the trade-offs between efficiency and ecology.

But the tension seems to come less from the eco- than from the anarchist part of the eco-anarchist project. Decisions concerning all aspects of individual and collective life need to be discussed at weekly meetings with the whole community and some decisions are put off for a long time “especially wherever the destruction of buildings and growing things is involved”.

Conflicts also arise between “the party” and free anarchists. The author draws a parallel here with the situation in Russia in the period 1917-1921, when party bureaucracy became as repressive as the system the revolution had toppled. The situation in this comic book is also similar to the one mentioned in my last post, where community-level organisations did not succeed in establishing themselves as an alternative to a centralized government while remaining democratic themselves. The experimentation with alternative technology failed because the groups were too busy discussing their internal politics or following the party line.

In conclusion, communal living is not easy, especially for city dwellers going “back to the land”. The author recognizes that looking back movements such as these appear irrelevant. The world in the 1970s was very far from the dreams people had in the 1960s.

It’s a pity the Class War Comix series didn’t continue, as in the second issue we would see the members of an industrial community “producing power, heat and light, building their own houses and making their artifacts” and in the third one, “growing and producing food, celebrating the harvest”. These different contexts could have been used to illustrate other (more positive) aspects of communal living.

References

Boyle, G., Harper, P. and the editors of Undercurrents (Eds.) (1976) Radical Technology. Wildwood House, London.

Harper, C. (1974) Class War Comix – New Times. Epic Productions, London.

 

Alternative Technology and Revolution in Portugal

This post continues the themes of sustainable housing and alternative technology and their roles in promoting grassroots social change. The post is about how these ideas were applied in practice in Portugal during the revolutionary years of 1974-1975.

Lisbon, 25 April 1974. A revolution topples the fascist regime. Source: Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]. Irrelevant but funny detail: Advertising poster in the bottom picture reads “Amid the pines, Miss Pin is born”

An interesting account of an experiment with radical technology is given in an article by Marta Pinheiro (1978) in Undercurrents, a UK-based magazine of radical science and alternative technology, published between 1972 and 1984.

The article talks about how science and technology could have played a part in the process of social change in the two years following the 25 April 1974 revolution – but they didn’t.

The author gives a first-person account of the work developed by the SAAL (Serviço Ambulatório de Apoio Local) [Network for Local Technical Support]. This service existed before the revolution, but it was used for building houses for the middle classes only. After the revolution, the SAAL changed its focus and aimed at being a vehicle for participatory democracy in housing policies, facilitating the collaboration between local communities and architects, engineers, sociologists, geographers and law-makers. The SAAL also channelled state funds for the re-housing of people living in slum areas and provided technical, organisational and financial assistance to organisations formed in these areas.

One of the aims of the SAAL was to advance the revolution by strengthening the links between agricultural and industrial workers and the marginalized populations living in the poorest urban communities – and that is where it failed.

The article gives the example of Bairro da Liberdade [Freedom Neighbourhood], a slum area in Setúbal, a city 40km south of Lisbon. After the 25 April revolution, the residents squatted a nearby block of flats but were convinced by the MFA (Armed Forces Movement), then in power, to return to the slum and were given a grant to build new houses there.

The SAAL then tried to forge links with the “workers’ commissions” that by 1975 had occupied most of the farms and factories in Portugal, in order to obtain building materials at less than the normal price. One of these factories was AC, whose workers had refused to continue building hotels and services for tourists and were then being paid by the state to provide housing for the needy. The SAAL coordinated the joint effort of these workers and unemployed people in the slum to build new houses in the area.

The project for re-housing the slum dwellers also counted with the help of volunteers. Among them was the Street Farm collective, an eco-anarchist group of architects from London, who were the subject of my previous post.

The story of the Street Farm involvement is told in detail in another article that appeared in 1975, in the Architectural Design magazine (“Revolutionary technology in Portugal”, no author’s name). The six architects arrived in Portugal in an old van “overloaded with handtools, plumbing fittings, a few textbooks and too many passengers”. Then they spent three weeks in the Bairro da Liberdade, experimenting with revolutionary architecture while enduring “bad renderings of Portuguese versions of English pop songs” and “groups of drunkards offering us wine” till three in the morning.

The Street Farm collective advocated a do-it-yourself approach to fulfil the housing needs of the disadvantaged groups. In Bairro da Liberdade, they tried to put into practice architectural solutions that were economically feasible and could be implemented by the community itself. The project would also be a demonstration to the world at large that it is possible to design buildings and neighbourhoods in an environmentally friendly way.

One of the main tasks was to come up with a cheap but efficient solution to supply the neighbourhood with hot water. So they created a hot water shower using scrap material collected from around the site and fed by solar energy. The result is in the picture below. The shower had two alternative solar collectors. The panel on the right was made with corrugated steel sheet and PVC piping. The cone on the left had a structure of wood and PVC piping which were insulated with screwed-up newspaper and finally covered with transparent polythene.

Source: Architectural Design 55-10 (1975)

The bemused slum dwellers formed queues to sample the hot water coming from the box built by the English eco-warriors, but it seems nobody took a shower until the warriors got some packing cases to enclose the structure.

In the Undercurrents article Marta explains other more difficult obstacles the project had to face.

An idea came up to make an even more ingenious solar panel by gouging out channels in a standard slab of cork and then bound a metal plate to it. The idea was promising because cork is a material that is abundant in Portugal. Contacts were then made with Mundet, one of the main cork factories in the country, to supply the cork needed. However, this business had specialized in the production of luxury goods and it was difficult for the workers to re-orientate production towards something completely different: an ecologically sustainable product made from scrap material and geared towards the basic needs of slum dwellers.

Some of the problems were technical, such as how to make the cork impermeable. The business had little capital to acquire machinery to treat the cork and the workers had little technical knowledge about how to do it. The other problems were organisational. The sole worker providing that technical knowledge became uncooperative because his son had a workshop and he wanted to profit from the idea of the solar panel.

Source: Pinheiro (1978)

The SAAL then tried to contact metallurgical workshops. Once again the workers did not have the skills to re-orientate their effort from activities that had always been geared towards external markets (such as repairing foreign boats) to the production of goods for the disadvantaged classes.

Only after several months could the SAAL find a factory where the cork could be treated and where the internal political set-up was compatible with their grassroots approach.

So they did manage to develop a finalised product, but by then the large meaning of the project had been lost, that is the design and production of a domestic item that could incorporate sustainable technology and at the same time enable the development of relationships between different groups of workers.

The shower was only a showpiece of the whole project of transformation of the slum area. However, the other efforts also faced similar obstacles. Marta reports that the joint collaboration in the construction of the new houses turned sour because the slum dwellers began to treat both SAAL technicians and the AD factory workers as their employees.

The SAAL did not succeed in establishing links between the residents of the slum areas and the industrial and agricultural workers, and alternative technology was not a vehicle for strengthening the political organisation of the working class. As in other areas, the seizure of political power was not accompanied by a seizure of economic power. Workers fought the revolutionary process armed with ideology but not with work instruments such as the ability to produce alternative technology.

So by 1978, everything was back to normal in Portugal. Of course, normality is relative:

“For the international businessman, it’s sea food restaurants worth breaking a flight for. However, for the mass of ordinary Portuguese people normality is pretty close to base subsistence” (Pinheiro 1978, p.9)

From an environmental perspective, the experiment in the application of alternative technology for constructing houses and planning neighbourhoods was just that – an experiment, whose main legacy are a couple of articles in hard-to-find architectural magazines (although the Undercurrents issue is now online).

The Street Farmers from London had concluded their account of the project in 1975 by saying that “the enthusiasm of the workers to consolidate the struggle in Portugal is not a romantic image of visiting optimists” (Architectural Design 55-10, p.623). But subsequent chapters of the story, as given by Marta’s article written three years later, proved that it was indeed a romantic image of visiting optimists.

Source: Architectural Design 55-10 (1975)

And what happened to Bairro da Liberdade? It remained an underprivileged part of a city that is itself one of the places in Portugal with highest incidence of poverty and unemployment.

Bairro da Liberdade, Setúbal. Source: André Barragon @ Panoramio

The SAAL interventions presupposed that land expropriated for housing construction would be communally owned by associations of local residents. But this never happened, and the occupation of the land remained illegal until May 2013, when the local municipality approved the urbanization plan of the area. But before that, parts of the neighbourhood had already been demolished.

References

Pinheiro, M. (1978) A.T. days that shook Portugal. Undercurrents 26, 9-12.

Revolutionary technology in Portugal, in Architectural Design 55-10 (1975), p. 619-62.

Street Farm – Eco-Anarchism, Architecture and Alternative Technology in London in the 1970s

The Street Farm collective was a London-based group of three (Graham Caine, Peter Crump and Bruce Haggart) active in the early 1970s and advocating a radical change in urban living, city planning and architecture.

Stephen H. Hunt has written a book about this group, published last month by Tangent Books. Last night he presented the book at Housmans bookshop, one of the best radical bookshops in London. He talked about how he first came across the work of the Street Farm group and how he eventually met members of the group and undertook the research that resulted in the book.

The main output of Street Farm was an underground magazine called Street Farmer, which published only two issues, in 1971-2 (available here and here). However, the group also made use of a variety of other media to disseminate their ideas, always using text and images in a very innovative way.

This is a group that is difficult to pigeonhole. They have been called many things, such as revolutionary urbanists, eco-anarchists, experimental architects, and even rock’n’roll architects:

Revolutionary urbanists

Street Farm advocated the transmogrification of the city, that is, the transformation of urban space through social revolution. In the utopian cities envisioned by the group, the distinctions between urban and rural and between work and home had been blurred. This vision was influenced by William Morris’s idea that creative productive work is the most enjoyable.

Tower blocks were the symbol of what is wrong in the city, not because of their architecture but because of the fact that, unlike in the cities in the past or in the utopian future, residents in those towers did not have any control over the way they were housed. So, the tower blocks were always vilified in the surreal collages produced by the group. In these images, buildings were invaded by trees, pecked by gigantic crows, used by giant women for pleasuring themselves, changed into plants after being seeded, or disintegrated after being sprayed by deodorant. Photo below from here

The group also started to draw people’s attention to the negative consequences of urban regeneration and gentrification, processes which were already visible in the 1970s. Some of the campaigns against demolitions were successful (such as the one to save London’s Covent Garden) while others were unsuccessful (for example, the campaigns to prevent demolition of the Beatles-famous Cavern Club in Liverpool or the demolition of houses to make way for the West Way, a motorway in London.

The streets in the cities envisioned by the collective would also smell better than the streets we know – due to a reduction of car traffic and pollution and to “rewilding” – measures to facilitate the reconnection of human beings with the natural world.

Eco-anarchists

Street Farm was also a political group, with ideas close to anarchism. Their vision of the city presupposed a redirection of the economic system in order to meet the needs of the communities and not those of state and capital. The ideas of the Situationist International also provided inspiration.

They also had a part in the movement for growing ecological awareness during in the 1970s, drawing on the work of Murray Bookchin and social ecology. They believed that unless we fix our relationship with the natural world, we cannot address problems of economic scarcity and social justice. Some catchphrases used were also close to the Deep Ecology thought. For example, “the land belongs to the communities of the biosphere, not  individuals of the human race” – a very “green” thing to say at the time.

Members of the group were also involved in street activism, such as campaigns anti-Vietnam war and for reclaiming public space from cars, and participated in the squatting movement in the early 1970s in the Camden and Kentish Town parts of London.

Experimental architects

Street Farm was not only about philosophy, the group wanted a “solutions-focused anarchism”. They aim was to encourage people to develop their knowledge about sustainable living. But the movement was not directed at hippies who leave the city and go to countryside but at people who stay in the city and transform it, by activities such as organic agriculture and the use of “liberated technology”.

This focus on direct action and grassroots mobilization was one of the aspects distinguishing Street Farm from older groups. The Archigrarn group had been working on experimental architecture in London since the 1960s, but by the 1970s they were no longer at the forefront of the agendas of the left and of environmental movements, so the Street Farm collective defined themselves against Archigram.

Street Farm was an early proponent of concepts such as community architecture and sustainable buildings. In 1972, Graham Caine built the Street Farmhouse in the South London suburb of Eltham, described in the media of the time as the “first ecological house” (although as Stephen mentioned in his talk, human beings have been building houses with biodegradable materials for millennia). The picture below (from the book) shows what seems to be only a cabin house with a green house attached. The innovations are that it was built from materials found in the streets and included solar panels and hydroponic gardens. The house was not very popular with the neighbours, who were quite pleased when it was demolished three years after it was built; so much that they even offered themselves to help to pull down the house.

Shortly after the group disbanded, Graham Caine went to Lisbon where he marched arm in arm with people celebrating the 1974 revolution in Portugal. He stayed there for a while working on a self-build housing project which included improvised solar heating systems. This story is very interesting and worth another blog post later on.

He continued to be involved in community living and sustainable housing over the years. Unfortunately, he also continued to meet with obstacles. Some projects failed like “a beautiful tree dying from a long and painful disease”, because of the self-interest of some community members and pressure from the real estate developers.

Rock’n’roll architects

The group also spread their ideas by travelling around showing slides of their collages to the sound of Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane. They visited every Architecture school in the UK. On one occasion, the vocalist of the Pink Fairies, a psychedelic rock band, sang an improvised “Street Farming Man” adaptation of a Stones song.

Their actions blurred the frontier between activism and performance art. For example, in their first intervention, they designed “scarecars”, masks used by participants on street blockades in London’s Oxford Street. On a visit to Italy, they distributed sunflower seeds for people to spread on pavements and make them green.

Street Farm also appeared on TV in a couple of occasions. At that time the BBC let radical grassroots groups produce their own films which they then broadcast. One of these films was by Street Farm. Their other TV appearance was in a more formal documentary about the group.

 

Despite these media appearances and the inclusion of the Street Farmhouse in some architecture books over the years, the work of the group is little known. This is because the printed material produced, including the Street Farmer magazine, had a very small circulation and is now very difficult to find. Stephen Hunt’s book is therefore a great resource for everyone interested in the group and in alternative environmentalism.

Besides telling the story of Street Farm, Stephen also talks about the context in which Street Farm appeared, in particular the work of other UK-based groups and underground publications, such as a group called PEST (Planet Earth Survival Team) and the ARse magazine (read either as Architects for a Really Socialist Environment or Architectural Radicals, Students and Educators – or as a joke on the Architecture Review journal). They also drew from other social movements around the world. For example, one of their images was of a clenched fist tree, an adaptation to political ecology of a symbol used by groups fighting for the rights of black people in the USA.

The book also reflects about the influence of Street Farm in the work of other green anarchists and the relevance of that work for today’s environmental problems. Attendants in yesterday’s event mentioned that the directions the group pointed at proved to be correct. People nowadays understand more about the buildings where they live and about things such as solar power and food growing.

The book is available from the publisher or from The Hive. They both sell online so there is no need to support tax-dodging corporations named after Greek warriors. Stephen also published another book in 2011 about Green Romanticism and several papers dealing with anarchism and environmentalism.

Peter Crumb also gave a talk about Street Farm in Bristol three years ago. Watch here.

 

Picture of yesterday’s event (by @Lucy_Latham88)

References

Hunt, S H. (2014) The Revolutionary Urbanism of Street Farm; Eco-Anarchism, Architecture and Alternative Technology in the 1970s. Tangent Books, Bristol.

Poetry, environment and national identity in Cape Verde – Part 2

The previous post was about the literature of the Cape Verde Islands in the 1930s, focusing on the groups of poets known as Claridade. It looked into how their use of environmental themes, and their interest on the relationships between geographic isolation, desertification and poverty, contributed for the emergence of a distinctive Cape Verdean voice, which paved the way for the creation of a national identity in the last decades of Portuguese rule.

This post is about work written in the second half of the 20th Century, describing how a new generation of writers continued the pioneering work of the Claridade movement, despite facing increased restrictions on free expression. The post-independence poetry also wrote about the social and environmental problems arising in the fast growing cities of the country.

The post-Claridade generation carried on the fatalistic themes of the Claridade movement, with emphasis on the links between poverty and the geographic determinism of island life, and portraying emigration as the way to break these links.

The influence is stronger in writers born in the 1910s and early 1920s, that is, about 10 years later than the Claridosos. The example below is Terra [Land] (1945) is from António Nunes (1917-1951). Translation of this and the next poem in Williams (2010).

Some prose works also treated the same themes, most notably Famintos [Starved], by Luís Romano (1962), a raw and violent account of poverty and famine, and how they related with political and economic oppression in the 1940s.

In 1947 the government found what they thought was the perfect solution for the famines (for them) and sent a significant part of the population to work in conditions akin to slavery in the coffee plantations in São Tomé e Príncipe, another Portuguese colony in Africa. The plight of the Cape Verdeans in São Tomé has been the subject of many poems since then.

Rolling barrels to transport water (1972). In Carreira (1972)

The writers born in the late 1920s and 1930s faced a more hostile political environment than the previous generation. The Portuguese dictatorship curtailed free speech and tried to silence critical voices, both in Portugal or in the colonies. Independence movements also started to arise throughout the colonies, including Cape Verde, and were met with repression from the dictatorship.

Publications were closed down by the government censor as soon as they emerged. Certeza was closed after two numbers in 1944 and the Suplemento Culturalof the Cabo Verdejournal (1958) was closed after a single number in 1958.

Despite the repression, authors such as Onésimo Silveira (born 1935) and Ovídio Martins (1928-1999) (one of the responsible for the Suplemento Cultural) were actively engaged in the struggle for freedom and political independence, while also writing about people’s resilience in face of environmental problems oppression.

While these poets continued the Claridade tradition of writing about draught and poverty, they sometimes used slightly different approaches, such as celebrating the rain after a period of draught.  excerpt from Onésimo Silveira – As águas [The waters] (1962)

Other poems are more direct, such as the one below, with the same title as the famous 1959 novel by Manuel Lopes.

Ovídio Martins – Flagelados do vento leste [Victims of the east wind]. In Martins (1962). My translation

Ovídio Martins continued expressing his views about oppression and struggle inside and outside his poetry. This vocal activism did not impress the Portuguese security service agency (PIDE), who arrested him and forced him to flee the country and live in exile in the Netherlands.

While the work of Cape Verdean writers in this period still portrayed the reality of the country, there was also a tendency for internationalization. The influence of Marxism-Leninism is evident in some work written in this period. Some of this work shares many subjects with books written by neo-realist writers in Portugal, such as Alves Redol and Soeiro Pereira Gomes. Atlântico, a Luso-Brazilian literary journal, also supported Cape Verdean publications. Some writers also published books in translation in other European countries such as France and the Soviet Union. At the same time, Cape Verdean emigrants in the USA started to produce their own work.

Independence came in 1975, creating the conditions for the emergence of a new literature. The influence of the Claridade movement remained visible, as the focus was still on the reality of the county and the necessity to write about the distinctive characteristics of the land and the people. However, this literature already pointed to new directions. New themes were introduced and new styles developed, as the poems became formally more complex. Jorge Carlos Fonseca, President of Cape Verde since 2011, was one of the most innovative poets, influenced by the surrealists and the Beat Generation.

A large part of the recent literature is also written in the language native to almost all Cape Verdeans (Creole). Works in Portuguese have also absorbed the flavours of the oral traditions of the Creole.

Some of the post-independence Cape Verdean literature was anthologised in a 1988 publication (updated in 1998) titled Mirabilis de Veias ao Sol [Almeida 1988].

This work was edited by José Luiz Hopffer Almada (b.1960), who also directed the Fragmento, a journal which together with Raízes (1977) and Ponto e Vírgula(1983) share the credit for being the pioneers of the new Cape Verdean literature.

In his contributions to the book above there are several references to the social and environmental problems appearing after the independence. These problems now appear at a different scale, of the city, due to the fast and chaotic growth of the main population centres, especially Praia, the capital city. This growth was due to migration from the interior of the islands and from the minor islands. The provision of basic housing and basic infrastructure to the growing cities was one of the main issues.

Once more, there is a close link between the social and the natural environment. However, while the droughts affect the whole nation, the environmental problems that come with urban poverty affect only a part of the population. If in the colonial times the solution of environmental problems required political freedom, in the post-independence era it requires more attention to social justice.

José Luiz Hopffer Almada-Antichuva [Anti-rain] (1986)

excerpt from José Luiz Hopffer Almada-Meio-dia putrefacto[Rotten midday] (1986). Terra Branca is a neighbourhood in Praia, the Capital of Cape Verde. Gaza as in Gaza strip. My translation.

excerpt from José Luiz Hopffer Almada –Permanência [Permanence] (1986). Translation by Gerald Moser here (p.48)

The environmental aspect is also present in the medium itself. The Ponto e Vírgulajournal contained a supplement printed in green paper and called Viver na Terra[Live in the land]. This journal was the main vehicle for the dissemination of ideas of the Associação dos Amigos da Natureza em Cabo Verde [Cape Verdean Friends of Nature Association].

The influence of the Claridade movement is still felt today and their heritage is becoming more accessible. In 2010 two books were published by the Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro[Cape Verdean institute of Books] revisiting the work of the Claridade group of poets. One of these publications [Silva 2010] collects the proceedings of a symposium held in Mindelo in 1986, on the 50 years of the establishment of the Claridade group. A 1000-page volume was also published [Bettencourt and Silva 2010] collecting a large number of texts written over the years about the movement.

The book below [William 2010] is to my knowledge the only bilingual anthology of Cape Verdean poetry (Portuguese or Cape Verdean Creole vs. English).

Sources in English about Cape Verdean literature are rare. This bibliography is a good start, as it contains many references and lists all the poems that appear in English translation in other works. Moser (1992) is also a good source of information about the post-independence writers. There are also a few articles like this one which may be interesting but are unfortunately not on open access.

References

Almeida, J L H. (1988, 1998) (ed.) Mirabilis de Veias ao Sol. Instituto de Promoção Cultural, Praia, Cabo Verde.

Bettencourt, F., Silva, A. (Eds.) (2010) Claridade – A Palavra dos Outros. Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro, Praia, Cabo Verde.

Carreira, A. (1977) Cabo Verde: Aspectos Sociais. Secas e fomes do Século XX. [Cape Verde: Social aspects. Droughts and famines in the 20th Century]. Ulmeiro, Lisboa, Portugal.

Martins, O. (1962) Caminhada. Edições CEI, Lisboa.

Moser, G M. (1992) Changing Africa: The First Literary Generation of Independent Cape Verde. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 82 (4).

Silva, T. V. (Ed.) (2010) Simpósio Internacional sobre Cultura e Literatura Cabo-verdianas. Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro, Praia, Cabo Verde.

Williams, F G. (2010) Poets of Cape Verde – A Bilingual Selection /Poetas de Cabo Verde – Uma Selecção Bilingue. Brigham Young University Studies, Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro and Instituto Camoes. Provo, Utah, USA; Praia, Cabo Verde; Lisbon, Portugal.

Poetry, environment and national identity in Cape Verde – Part 1

This blog starts with two posts on the links between Cape Verdean poetry pre- and post- independence and the environmental problems that the country faces due to its geographic location.

Today’s post focuses on the work of the Claridade group of poets in the 1930s, who established modern Cape Verdean poetry. The second post will cover the influence of this group in the work of contemporary writers.

Cape Verde is a small island country off the African coast, around 650 km from Senegal. It is independent since 1975, when it ceased to be a Portuguese colony. The archipelago was uninhabited when the Portuguese arrived in 1456. As a result, the Cape Verdean society is more ethnically diverse than other African nations, as it was settled by people from Europe and Africa.

I have written several posts about the country in my other blog, focusing on aspects of local environment, urbanism and mobility in the capital city (Praia).

The climate of the archipelago suffers the influence of the Sahara desert. The islands are then subject to recurrent droughts, or more precisely, to the cycle of droughts and flooding.

Traditionally, the subjects and styles of Cape Verdean literature were aligned with those of Portuguese writers, and presented what was essentially an alien, Westernised, and unoriginal vision of the world. In any case, the output of native writers, living in Cape Verde, was very limited.

The panorama of Cape Verdean literature was forever changed after the 1930s, with the work of a group of poets known as Claridade [Clarity], who published in a journal with the same name in the city of Mindelo in São Vicente Island.

Although only nine numbers of this journal were published, from 1936 to 1966, they had a long-lasting influence on Cape Verdean culture. The originals of this journal are now rarities but a good part of their content has been included in several collections published over the years. The nine numbers were republished in 1986 to celebrate the 50 years of the first number.

Jorge Barbosa (1902-1971) is one of the names credited with the establishment of the group and is considered as one of the most important writers in the history of the country. Other often-cited names are Manuel Lopes (1907-2005), the first director of the Claridade journal, and Baltasar Lopes (also know by his pen name Osvaldo Alcântara) (1907-1989).

The work of this group had an important role in shaping Cape Verdean identity, because it signalled the cultural independence of the country. It presented a distinctive voice, free from literary models copied from the western tradition. More importantly, the themes explored were specific to the Cape Verdean reality and to the feelings of its population. The work is usually of a realist nature, inspired in the natural and social conditions of the islands, and includes many elements of local life and culture such as racial diversity, oral traditions, and local folklore. These developments occurred simultaneously with the emergence of a distinctive style of Cape Verdean music, the morna, with features the same mixture of sadness and rhythm.

The environment was one of the main themes of the Claridade movement. In fact, Jorge Barbosa entitled one of his poem collections as Ambiente (Environment). The island environment is presented by the Claridosos as a series of constraints to human life: geographic isolation, the omnipresence of the sun and the sea, and the recurrent droughts. These constraints define the fate of the Cape Verdean man and his vulnerability to famine and poverty.

excerpt from Jorge Barbosa – A Terra [The Land]. First published in 1935, included in Barbosa (1989). My translation (same for other poems in this post).

As a colonized country, Cape Verde was dependent on solutions provided by the colonizer for mitigating the impact of droughts. Food distributions were organised, but were often marred by violence and corruption

Waiting for food distribution (1903), in Carreira (1984).

Although the way in which the natural and social environment is described seems fatalistic, the poems also emphasize the resilience of local people. In an essay on the environmental aspects of Jorge Barbosa’s poetry, published in Revista Cultura n.2 (1998) (also in Bettencourt and Silva 2010), Manuel Veiga writes that “drought wears and kills, but it also fertilizes resistance. The smallness of the islands suffocates and crushes, but it also gives rise to dreams, departures and returns”.

The poems also implicitly support the idea of independence of the islanders, both economic (through emigration) and political (through freedom from colonial rule). The islands were compared to a prison, surrounded by the sea and subject to the rule of a foreign country. But at the same time, the sea also showed that there is a way out and provided hope to the islander.

Jorge Barbosa – Prisão [Prison]. First published in 1941, also in Barbosa (1989)

excerpt from Jorge Barbosa – O mar [The sea]. First published in 1935,also in Barbosa (1989)

Jorge could not be more explicit at that time when every word was closely scrutinised by the fascist regime that ruled Portugal. Poems such as the one below, where the plight of the islanders is more closely related to colonial rule, were published much later:

Jorge Barbosa-Meio milénio [Half a millenium]. Written in 1960, published in Barbosa (1993).

The links between the constraints posed by environment and subjugation to colonial rule are more obvious when we hear the authors speaking about their work. The book below is an excellent resource as it collects interviews (in Portuguese) with the major writers of the Claridade and post-Claridade periods.

In his interview, Baltasar Lopes admits that the work of the Claridade group was pessimistic, as it defined national identify based on poverty, solitude, and despair; and offered only one explicit solution for the social and environmental problems of the islanders: emigration [Laban 1992, vol. 1, p.28-29].

A similar view is given by Manuel Lopes in his interview (p.86-87). However, he also balances the influence of man and environment in the fate of the Cape Verdeans, mentioning the inadequacy of the Portuguese government in addressing famines in the islands (p.89).

The social and political inequality in the colony is illustrated in one of his poems, “O menino do cais” [The boy on the pier], included in the same interview (p.91):

Manuel comments that there is a “boy on the pier” whenever a minority imposes its power and ideology to the national majority, and where weapons are pointed to the “convicts” who try to break the bonds and be free.

The relationships between environmental conditions, colonial rule and poverty in the islands are also explored in the prose works of the Claridade group, most notably in Osvaldo Alcântara’s Chiquinho (1947) and Manuel Lopes’ Chuva Braba [Strong Rain] (1956) and Os Flagelados do Vento Leste [The Victims of the East Wind] (1959).

Was the work of the Claridosos totally original? Not really. In fact, the group borrowed heavily from subjects and styles developed by writers from the Brazilian North-East. Like Cape Verde, this region is also vulnerable to drought conditions. In the 1930s, authors such as Graciliano Ramos, Jorge Amado, and José Lins do Rego started to write about the social and political dimensions of this geographic determinism. This work was a source of inspiration for Portuguese-speaking writers in Cape Verde.

excerpt from Jorge Barbosa – Você Brasil [You, Brazil], first published in 1956, included in Barbosa (1989).

So although the work of the Claridade group was innovative in the literary context of Cape Verde, it is sometimes criticised as still being derivative, only now not of European literary traditions but of the new Brazilian literature.

Nevertheless, the influence of this work in shaping Cape Verdean national identity cannot be denied. This is because the poets did not write only about their own sorrows but also about the problems of the whole nation.

In addition, the use of literature for relating environmental and social aspects represents a significant contribution to environmental thought, decades before these relationships were analysed in more formal ways by political philosophers in the social ecology movement.

The next post will focus on the influence of the Claridade group in the themes of younger writers and give some examples of authors who treated the same social and environmental issues as the Claridade and the problems arising in the later part of the 20th century, such as chaotic urban growth.

References

Barbosa, J. (1989) Poesias. Instituto Caboverdiano do Livro e do Disco, Praia, Cabo Verde.

Barbosa, J. (1993) Poesia Inédita e Dispersa. Edições ALAC, Linda-a-Velha, Portugal.

Bettencourt, F., Silva, A. (Eds.) (2010) Claridade – A Palavra dos Outros. Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro, Praia, Cabo Verde.

Carreira, A. (1984) Cabo Verde: Aspectos Sociais. Secas e fomes do Século XX. [Cape Verde: Social aspects. Droughts and famines in the 20th Century]. Ulmeiro, Lisboa, Portugal.

Laban, M. (Ed.)(1992) Cabo Verde – Encontro com Escritores (2 vols.). Fundação Eng. António de Almeida, Porto.