A Paradise Built in Hell (27 page)

Disaster belongs to the sociologists, but carnival to the anthropologists, who talk of its liminality. That is, like initiation rites, carnival takes place in a space betwixt and between familiar, settled states; it is a place of becoming in which differences diminish and commonalities matter, a separation from what came before. The anthropologist Victor Turner noted that liminal moments open up the possibility of
communitas,
the ties that are made when ordinary structures and the divides they enforce cease to matter or exist. The celebration that is carnival often resembles disaster in being made of turbulence and destruction: of people throwing colored powders in India or candies and meringues in Spain or beads in New Orleans; of creating huge messes in the streets and leaving piles of debris behind; of shouting, rushing, dancing, spinning; of mingling with strangers who are for the moment less strange; of images of the grotesque, the morbid, and the unsettling.

To make fellowship, joy, and freedom work for a day or a week is far more doable than the permanent transformation of society, and it can inspire people to return to that society in its everyday incarnation with renewed powers and ties. The anarchist theorist Hakim Bey famously coined the term
temporary autonomous zones
to describe these phenomena, neither revolution nor festival, in which people liberate themselves for pleasure and social reinvention. He saw their ephemerality as a survival technique, a way of arising, affecting, and vanishing before any move to repress arose: “The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere /elsewhen,
before
the State can crush it.” The goal is not permanence or confrontation, and the moment of liberation can be re-created, so that its lapse is not necessarily a defeat.

At the beginning of the long vacation-time walk during which he would establish his poetic vocation, the twenty-year-old William Wordsworth landed in Calais, France. He and his traveling companion arrived on July 14, 1790, the first anniversary of the dawn of the French Revolution, an anniversary that has been a festival almost ever since. It was a year since outraged Parisians had stormed the Bastille. A subsequent series of events, some violent, some festive, had upended the ancient political system and opened up what seemed, then, to truly be an era of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Revolutionary France was reinventing itself in accord at first with ideals and then with the undercurrents of power and fear—but in 1790, all was still bright. On that anniversary, as Wordsworth described it in his long autobiographical poem
The Prelude
, revolution’s dawn recurred as festival:

It’s a remarkable moment in history, a festival that is also the reiteration of a revolution, a symbolic reenactment of its promise that is also a fulfillment.

They traveled on:

Wordsworth captures some of the key ingredients of such a moment: a joy magnified by its shared condition; the suspension of ordinary time; and the sense of a transformed human nature that opens up tremendous, hopeful possibility. Historian Mona Ozouf writes, “It was the great national thaw, already sensed by the Marquis de Ségur when he returned to France from Russia in 1790. He found that people spoke freely: in every public square ‘groups of men were talking in lively fashion.’ The old fear and circumspection had gone from their eyes: even ‘individuals of the lower classes’ had a proud, direct gaze. Everywhere there was noise and an ‘extraordinary sense of movement.’ ” The revolution began with a sense of openness and egalitarianism; it degenerated into a bloodbath and the erection of new hierarchies. And French society would never again be subjugated the way it had under the absolutist monarchies and stark class divides of the ancien régime.

And that ephemeral liberation emerged again and again. During the Paris Commune of 1871, the painter Gustave Courbet said in a letter, “Paris is a true paradise. . . . all social groups have established themselves as federations and are masters of their own fate.” During the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell wrote of loyalist-controlled Barcelona’s transformation, “Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. . . . Above all there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom.” Eleanor Bakhtadze, a student during the French upheaval of 1968, which began as a student rebellion and ended as a powerful national strike that toppled the de Gaulle regime, said, “Paris was wonderful then. Everyone was talking.” Of the Czechoslovakian uprising the same year, the photographer Josef Koudelka remembers, “Everbody forgot who he was. . . . Miracles were happening. People behaved like they never had before; everyone was respectful and kind to each other. I felt that everything that could happen in my life was happening during those seven days. It was an exceptional situation that brought out something exceptional from all of us.”

Ariel Dorfman reports something similar from the dawn of the left-wing Allende administration in Chile in 1970. He spoke of people told they were powerless all their lives grasping this moment of victory and reports that he himself “felt life quicken and accelerate, I felt the giddiness of those few great moments in your existence when you know that everything is possible, that anything is possible. I felt as if I were the first man on Earth and this was the first day in history.” Giaconda Belli writes that July 18 and 19, 1979, when the Sandinista rebels overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, were “two days that felt as if a magical, age-old spell had been cast over us, taking us back to Genesis, to the very site of the creation of the world.” An editor who was in South Africa when the apartheid era came to an end described to me the same sense of openness to an unknown future and each other and joy in liberty. Over and over again appears this sense of people having stepped together into the rosy dawn of greater possibilities, into a place where they feel their own power, the possibility of connection and concerted effort, and with those, hope. This is not only an idea but a feeling, a surge that has everything to do with making history. It’s a liminal time, a time between worlds that is a world of its own. Wordsworth wrote elsewhere, in praise of the French Revolution,

It was not the achievement of the revolution but its air of possibility that was so radiant to Wordsworth.

Disaster’s message that anything could happen is not so far away from revolution’s exhortation that everything is possible. Revolutions beget a similar moment when the very air you breathe seems to pour out of a luminous future, when the people all around you are brothers and sisters, when you feel an extraordinary strength. Then the revolutionary moment of utter openness to the future turns into one future or another. Things get better or they get worse, but you are no longer transfigured, the people around you are no longer quite so beloved, and private life calls with its small, insistent whisper. (And privacy is what we are happy to go home to after communing with strangers and neighbors in carnival or friends at a party; the trick is knowing how and why to join again in due time.)

There was a carnival of sorts that sought this renewal specifically, the jubilee that has always hovered as a promise and never been executed as an actuality unless you call a revolution a jubilee. The jubilee described in Leviticus is supposed to happen every fifty years and “proclaim liberty throughout all the land,” free the slaves, cancel debts, return the land to the original owner (who might be God or no one), let the fields lie fallow, and bring about a long reprieve from work. Slaves sang of jubilee; early-nineteenth-century revolutionaries embraced it as a great redistribution of wealth, a starting over even; and the British group Jubilee Research (formerly Jubilee 2000) seeks the cancellation of third-world debt as jubilee’s contemporary equivalent. The idea of jubilee is a revolution that recurs as a festival.

A disaster sometimes wipes the slate clean like a jubilee, and it is those disasters that beget joy, while the ones that increase injustice and isolation beget bitterness—the “corrosive community” of which disaster scholars speak. Some, perhaps all, do both. That is to say, a disaster is an end, a climax of ruin and death, but it is also a beginning, an opening, a chance to start over. (It is also a way to start over for capitalism, creating markets for the replacement of what has been destroyed and more.) And in this light, we can regard the Puritan work ethic as a force of privatization, not only the spiritual privatization of Protestantism but also the privatization of what was hitherto public civic life. The moments of carnival, community, and political participation are in those terms nonproductive, wasted time, even—if you think of the seventeenth-century New England Puritans punishing those who celebrated Christmas—violations of belief. The widespread distrust of the life of unpoliced crowds, manifested in urban and particularly suburban design in the United States, in the bans by dictatorships on public gatherings, in the writings of Le Bon and the plans for disaster are measures against carnival and popular power.

The utilitarian argument against fiestas, parades, carnivals, and general public merriment is that they produce nothing. But they do: they produce society. They renew the reasons why we might want to belong and the feeling that we do. The product is far less tangible than everyday goods and services but vital all the same—if absent from many contemporary societies. A festival is a sowing of wildness and a harvest of joy and belonging. An endless fiesta would be exhausting and demoralizing: the pleasure would go out of it, the masks would disguise only fatigue and apathy, and there would eventually be nothing to celebrate. The ordinary and the extraordinary need each other, or rather everyday life needs to be interrupted from time to time—which is not to say that we need disaster, only that it sometimes supplies the interruption in which the other work of society is done. Carnival and revolution are likewise interruptions of everyday life, but their point is to provide something that allows you to return to that life with more power, more solidarity, more hope.

Lucha libre
means Mexico’s theatrical version of wrestling, but the word
lucha
is less specific than the English word
wrestling:
it means struggle and it is used in a political sense all the time. Lucha libre, free struggle, the enormously popular Mexican sport, serves as entertainment with symbolic and political dimensions, a carnival of masculine power and imaginative adventure. Like most sports, lucha libre serves as a drama with an unknown outcome for the conflicts between the
tecnicos
, good guys who play by the rules, and
rudos
, who cheat and generally embody evil. The wrestlers are always masked, anonymous, with stage names that have no ordinary names behind them, and so they parade like the figures in a carnival, dressed as gods, heroes, animals, and myths of the past. Among the best-known names are Blue Demon, the Black Shadow, and Thousand Masks. To unmask a wrestler is to defeat him definitively, and wrestlers sometimes compete for their tight-fitting, face-covering headpieces with letters, emblems, or colors that reflect the superhero names of the wrestlers. Ripping another wrestler’s mask off is grounds for disqualification.

The most celebrated of all Mexican wrestlers was the silver-masked El Santo, the Saint, whose career spanned four decades, countless victories in the ring, fifty-two films, mostly science fiction and monster movies, and a lot of comic books. A week before he died, he pulled his mask back to reveal his face on television, but he was buried with the mask on. Lucha libre is the most carnivalesque of sports, depending on disguise and transformation, embodying metaphysical concerns about power, ethics, and justice.

Until 1987, many wrestlers’ careers overflowed the ring into pop culture, but one wrestler came from far outside the ring to wrestle with injustice. Super Barrio emerged from the ruins of the 1985 earthquake, or rather from the lucha, the struggle that came out of the earthquake. When politicians cut ribbons or staged other public events they hoped would reflect well on them, Super Barrio would show up and pressure them to do better by the poor. He confronted landlords; showed up at evictions, meetings, and demonstrations; inspired the strugglers to feel more powerful and confident. He became famous as a sort of latter-day Robin Hood of the urban poor, and he lives on more than two decades after he first appeared. He is credited with stopping ten thousand evictions, and when he appeared on camera in a recent documentary he spoke about his politics in such phrases as, “We have asserted that the city belongs to everyone” and “The credit goes to the people. Who is behind the mask matters least” and “Super Barrio is all of us.” Though the only one in costume, he placed everyone around him in carnival mode and opened up the possibilities.