2.
At the hospital they bandage up my hand. Since moving to the field I had kept what was left of my life savings strapped to my thigh. I use about a quarter of this money to pay the hospital. Of course I haven’t been the only one beaten. Over the next days I learn they’ve tracked down as many workers as they could find. The attacks are always the same: they find workers out alone, far away from the field, and beat us within an inch of our life. It is obvious why they don’t want to come for us in the field, where they would have to face thousands of angry workers all at the same time. At the next meeting we decide to only travel in packs, don’t go anywhere in a group of less than ten. We’re starting to put together a strategy. Different subcontractors run different buses and different crops; they don’t all work together, at least not yet, so it will be hard for them to present a united front. We are sure there must be some way we can use this chaos, this lack of coordination, to our advantage.
There was a particular moment I will always remember from that last decisive meeting before the strike. The mentor had brought a giant chalkboard out into the field. Where she got such a chalkboard, or why she thought it was necessary, are both aspects of this moment I am unable to unravel, but it took four of us to carry it from the roof of her car out towards the bonfire. On the chalkboard she had made lists of all the tasks that needed to be done, and as she read these tasks, people called out their names to volunteer. Very quickly the chalkboard filled with names and each name called out seemed to me like one step closer to the oncoming storm. I had unstrapped my life savings from my thigh and decided to spend the rest of it on food and water for the strike. If the strike was successful I would find other ways to survive, and if it failed I would be dead, in jail or expelled from the country. In at least two of these scenarios I would have little need for cash.
When the chalkboard was full, the mentor asked us all to sit for a minute of silence. The silence was for her husband, who had died in a struggle much like the one we planned to start first thing tomorrow. But it was also for every worker who had ever suffered or died in a struggle for their basic rights. We all sat in silence, nothing to listen to but the crackle of fire, and during the silence I thought about all these people I had met since coming here. How they had accepted me almost immediately, laughed at and with me, taken my foolhardy plan — was it a plan or was it only a desire — almost more seriously than I had at first. I then wondered if any of the men sitting with us were spies, rats on the payroll of one of the subcontractors, and the minute this meeting was over they would run to the bosses and describe anything and everything they could remember. But a minute of commemorative silence is not the right time to be thinking of rats, and before it was done I hope I gave at least a few seconds for a quick prayer that we’d all survive, that whatever happens next we don’t turn on each other and instead find ways to lend each other our strength. She must have been reading my mind, because the mentor brought the silence to a close by asking each of us to look inside ourselves. (I wanted to roll my eyes but also didn’t want to undermine her in any way.) She said we each should think long and hard to figure out where we, each of us individually, could find the strength to hold out, to keep going for as long as it takes.
She then thought we should each say something, a few words or a few sentences. These words could be anything, but if we all listened to each other, we could later remember what others had said in moments we were losing faith or the will to go on. What each of us said now might be like a message in a bottle we were throwing into the future, to lend us hope at some future moment we might need it the most. Once again, after each of us had said his piece, there were quiet pockets of translation. Statement, translation, statement, translation, and on it went until every last one of us had said at least a few words. I learned so much as we went round and around. It was both heartfelt and heartbreaking. I don’t think I’ve ever listened that hard in my life. I wish I could now remember every last word, but I don’t, so I fear these are just a few of the lines I still recall, that stuck with me, though I’m sure I’ve gotten some of them slightly wrong, and perhaps with others completely missed the point.
“If I ever have children I don’t want their life like this. Or when any of us have children. Our children should have something else.”
“Make the bastards pay.”
“Dignity. That is what makes life worth living. We all know this.”
“I came here looking for a better life and all we get is shit. And yet today I feel something different.”
“I look around at all the faces and think: these are the people I want to fight with. Win or lose, I feel proud to be doing this with all of you.”
“We have no choice. We win or we die.”
“If my father could see me now, I know he would be proud of me.”
“Those fuckers will learn to treat us with respect.”
“I’m afraid. There’s no shame in admitting you’re afraid. But I won’t back down.”
“When I think that we’re all in this together, it almost makes me want to cry.”
“Dignity. I also think that’s the best word. Dignity.”
“They beat us but they don’t yet kill us. They think if they beat a few dozen of us we’ll get scared and back down. That’s maybe what always happened before. They beat a few of the troublemakers and everyone else backed down. But now we’re organized and it will take more than a few beatings to stop us.”
“I just want to stand up. I just want to look the problem in the eyes and stay on my feet.”
“If we fight, whatever else happens, they no longer own us like they did before. Already there’s something we’ve won.”
“We aren’t slaves. No one should ever be able to say that they own us.”
“I can’t fucking wait to tell them about this back home.”
“Just a few weeks ago all of this seemed impossible to me. I still can barely believe any of this is happening. It’s like a dream.”
“I can feel it in my bones. We’re going to win. Maybe not everything, but we’re going to win.”
“Some day all these fields will be workers’ co-ops. And the capitalists will no longer get a share.”
1.
I was told it would be an informal gathering. Instead it feels more like a job review. But it was only an informal gathering. And, after all, who were they to review me. I sit at the front of the boardroom, doing my best to ooze my natural charm, to speak to each of the colleagues staring at me as if I was speaking to them alone. The order of my talk is easy enough to achieve, each of the places I’ve visited and what I may or may not have learned there: Cologne, Milan, Zurich, Singapore, etc. But as I’m placing my spin across each of these stories, I can feel the spin is not quite taking shape. As I’m talking — I don’t know why I didn’t notice this before — I realize each of these stories is almost only about me, has little to do with the relative health or strength of the organization. I don’t know if others in the room are picking up on it, but as the cities I visited pile up in my recounting of them, I feel I am recounting yet another cliché of a cliché: the man who travelled the world only to find himself dissecting the minutiae of his own reflection.