Solidarity Superbloom
what do a tent and a flower have in common?
As soon as a flower decides to bloom, it does not change its mind. It never stops halfway through, realizing it had been a false warm spell and not spring at all; or, missing the buzz of its native bee, reverses course. it only goes on, as if once a flower has been thought, it must follow through on bud, petal, color, and fruit, even if the end is mash.
I have never been good at choosing a path. I don't think this shows from the outside. It may appear that my flower always blooms straight through. But that's not my experience. I'm always wondering whether I'm inside the right spring. If I shouldn't be otherwise occupied with something else, leaving paths half finished, abandoned for the side of the road where I inevitably get turned around.
Most of my metaphors recently have been plant-based, and there's a reason for that. I've started working part-time in my local garden store. It's four blocks away from my home. It's where we used to buy cat food when we still had Gus Gus, where they let us return the unfinished box for cash when he passed. It's where my husband has run pet food drives through the nonprofit where they work, and where they've run shows for traveling musician friends passing through town. After a long period of never enough, and years of trying to find my niche in academia, it was the easiest thing in the world to walk down there with my resume and ask if they were hiring. It was the easiest thing, to be helped.
I thought I wouldn't write about this. I thought I'd do my work and get back to writing, although every time I've promised myself I wouldn't write about something, it always ended up being the exact thing I most needed to write about. Work isn't supposed to help; its supposed to be something we do against our will, while miserable. It's supposed to be a reward after many long and degrading application seasons. Coming from an academic background, it's supposed to be tenured and tedious and the thing you do so as to be able to put writing and literature at the center of your life.
But I feel no compunction now in saying that I’ve left “the university” for good. As exciting as it has been to watch the the Popular University for Palestine unfold at campuses nationally, I hold little optimism that university administrators will hold to any promises secured to divest, like the promise of a vote just agreed on at Brown. Universities will behave like cities did in 2020, voting to defund police departments and never actually bringing this promise to life. A promise of a vote five months down the line does little for the Palestinians who will be killed by Israeli occupiers between then and now. I’ve lost all faith in the compromises of the university, culturally and in my own life. I’m committing to a different path.
***
Samuel P. Catlin’s recent essay “The Campus Does Not Exist” puts forward an interesting thesis about the popular psychological campus in this country. “The essential components of the campus,” he writes, “are not the classroom, the library, the laboratory, or even the dormitory, but rather the security camera and the cruising police SUV.” To this I would add only the construction site, ever-present on every university campus I’ve set foot on over the last 20 years, a necessary indicator to donors that infusions of capital are healthy and flowing. Students spend four years skirting chain link fence and the roar of backhoes; the gutted and supposedly aged buildings beyond repair stand half demolished, spewing dust and dirt and revealing concrete institutional innards. The campus is in a constant state of regeneration necessitated by a death drive toward growth at all costs, Shiny new buildings are meant to attract new students and their tuition dollars, new stadiums honor the gifts of millionaire alums. These sites are not present in the psychological campus Catlin elucidates, but they are a fixture meant to go unobserved in plain sight by all who traverse the physical campus.
Meanwhile, the tent erects a place within a place. It does so quickly and with no infusion of capital—witness students running under caution tape and feverishly setting up tents on university quads around the country. The tent’s walls are opaque and too flimsy to support surveillance cameras, and thus an onlooker’s desire to know what goes on inside is thwarted. The tent is a sovereign and moveable territory, a threat to a nation of laws designed to centralize and solidify control over stolen land.
There is a battle ongoing over the meaning of the tent—is it shelter? is it recreation, and therefore profit? Are tents a symbol of resilience, of struggle, of modesty and creativity in the face of depravity, or are they a sign of a city that’s lost pride in itself? And if you think the latter, remember that a city is also a tent, a temporary settlement, just like a country. We all live under this one tarp together, and sweeping tents out of sight will not make you happier or safer.
Here in Portland, our leaders tell us tents are only for the rich. They tell us tents should be bought, not stolen or given away, as the massive outdoor retailer REI reminded us on its way out of town, when it said downtown Portland was overrun with the unruly and the poor. (Good riddance, I say.) Tents should be kept in our closets, they implied, dusty and dark, unused save for the few times a year when we leave the city and pay to go to campgrounds and parks.
Tents and wildflowers both draw attention to the corners unconquered by capitalism, to the places left fallow due to their odd shape, uneven ground, undesirable location.
***
Last fall I attended a small rally outside Portland’s city hall organized by the local chapter of Stop the Sweeps. It was in response to the beginning of a daytime camping ban in public spaces, parks and sidewalks. Portland has a long history of pushing around houseless communities, forcing them from downtown where services are concentrated to faraway industrial sites or strips of land in between rail yards and highways. Like other cities, the reasons offered for these relocations and sweeps are a shrill call for “safety,” very similar to the calls for safety shouted by college presidents and administrators intent on sweeping Gaza solidarity encampments.
At the rally, one formerly unhoused individual set up his tent in front of city hall, saying he hoped he would receive the first ticket under Portland’s camping ban. But the words that most impacted me that day were from a dapper older man in brimmed hat and scarf who stood with difficulty and talked about his fond memories of living outside. His only request was that he be allowed to live outside if he wanted to, free of harassment by city officials, and with some dignity.
This affirmation of the tent as a site of potential agency, joy, and sovereignty frustrated the narrative of finding solutions to the housing crisis promulgated by big cities. The possibility that some people may want to live outside not to escape crowded shelters but for a feeling of freedom and connection to the earth does not cross the minds of city administrators. Liberals see this as cheating; living outside allows one to forgo mortgages and rent, home insurance and lawnmowers. People call the police on encampments, I suspect, not out of a fear for their safety, but as punishment for those who dare to find an escape hatch from a system in which they themselves are increasingly stretched thin and miserable. A happy urban camper frustrates the narrative of who needs help out of an untenable reality.
I am not saying that you should see a tent on a sidewalk and feel happy or inspired or amazed at human ingenuity—housing is a human right, and no person should be evicted or forced from their home to live in a tent out of necessity. But if all you are able to see in a tent on a city sidewalk is blight—not suffering, not a chance to help, not people doing the best they can with what they have, or even joy—then you need to set a neighborhood watch in your heart to find where your empathy has gone. Because the tent is not going away, not in this age of runaway inflation, intensifying natural disasters, and the forcible displacement of millions of people due to violence, war, and genocides around the world. The tent is in the running to become the most prevalent totem of this early 21st century.
I’ve seen a lot of shaming online in tweets and memes, implying that there are those who support the students protesting and occupying their own universities, but who don’t bring the same level of commitment to the houseless communities outside their doors. Not only does it strike me as odd and ineffective to immediately approach this burgeoning solidarity with shame and suspicion, but there is no addressee on the the other side of this statement. Those who report homeless encampments to police are the same ones who call the police on students. More important, I think, is the centrality of the tent in both of these struggles: the struggle for shelter—physical, real—and the struggle for psychic shelter, the ability to learn and be educated without participating in and funding arms manufacturers.
Instead of shaming, camp out in solidarity. Imagine a summer of everyone who is able camping out in the streets, the city parks, making it impossible to distinguish between who is “housed” and who is “unhoused” because everyone refuses this binary altogether. A superbloom of tents unfurling in places where they’re not supposed to thrive, a vast and endless field of solidarity staked into the earth because the conditions are ripe for it.
***
The “most effective pollinator principle” states that flowers are shaped by natural selection through the most frequent and effective floral visitors. This allows the scientist to predict pollinators for new plants by observing the structure of a bloom, its timing, scent, and other characteristics. Long tubular flowers call out for hummingbirds and hawkmoths with their slender proboscis. The Brazilian guava tree attracts rats as its main pollinator with its tender fleshy petals. The shape of something corresponds to the shape of who is using it and their specific needs.
This is to say that the tent, like the flower, doesn’t mean just one thing. We should pay attention to the differences between the tents outside of Rafah of dispossessed Palestinians fearing impending massacre, the tents that line the streets or cities that spend millions on new athletic stadiums, and the tents that are part of the Gaza solidarity encampments and the Popular University for Palestine on college campuses. These differences are crucial, and they point to new possibilities for creating places within places and solidarity through the tent.
Upcoming
FLOQ, a trans writing workshop and open mic, happens every first Friday of the month through the summer here in Portland at Bishop & Wilde. We meet again this Friday, May 3. All are welcome at the open mic, but the stage is reserved for trans readers only. RSVP for the free workshop beforehand in space donated by Tin House upstairs. Masks are required.
I’ll be moderating the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology’s Spring Keynote event, “Circling the Wolf: What Kaleidoscopic Thinking Can Teach Us About Interconnection,” a reading and Q&A with Erika Berry, author of the Oregon Book Award-winning Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear. Free event, register here.
Come visit me at Fang! Pet & Garden Supply. Find me working the garden center on weekends <3
Very wonderful commentary on protest and the meaning of tents.