Violence as Ancestral Knowledge

BENIGN VIOLATION

When I began thinking about Caroline Garcia’s work last year, it was through the prism of an internet catchphrase, I woke up and chose violence, which had become a meme during the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic. After Garcia adopted the meme as the name of her June 2022 Recess session, I found myself puzzling over it more deeply—as if doing so might unlock not only a closer understanding of her work, but also of some greater chain of meaning imparted by the viral internet.

Online, variations of wake up and choose violence were often paired with images of cute, cuddly animals unexpectedly going feral; the site Know Your Meme offers the example of a blurry selfie of a person in bed with a cat biting their arm like it’s a chew toy. The meme’s tipping point into popular familiarity (again per KYM) was the result of a tweet posted by user @_dalia7 in July 2020: mosquitos really wake up everyday and choose violence. That tweet collected over a half-million likes, seeming to embody a mundane, low-stakes kind of humor that worked during a time of global crisis and unprecedented online-ness.

Often, memes seem to revel in clashes between opposing epistemologies, as in the case of @_dalia7’s tweet. In the mosquito’s reality, a human conception of violence has no meaning or utility—sucking human blood is just in their DNA. To most people, the idea of an insect or animal choosing violence reads as absurd, or at least silly, because we typically don’t view animals as having the same “free will” that we ascribe to humans. Eventually, though, wake up and choose violence mutated into the first-person statement Garcia quotes, which exudes defiance and a bit of an underdog spirit: I woke up and chose violence. But something funny about the statement remains even when it’s spoken from a human perspective.

Maybe I woke up and chose violence amounts to a “benign violation,” in which humor allows us to ideate “an alternative norm suggesting that the [socially unacceptable] situation is acceptable” as long as it feels harmless enough to do so; in comedy this is often achieved through psychological distancing. In the context of the meme, that distance shows up in how we perceive the relationship between violence and choice, pointing to the obvious understanding that choosing to commit violent acts is not normally acceptable in our social world. A weightier interpretation is that violence—with its deeply-rooted causes and effects, and enormous power to shape our social relations and lived reality—forecloses on choice in a much more profound sense, even threatening such sacred ideas as human “free will.” Maybe it would be more accurate to say that violence chooses us, and then we are left with the difficult task of shaping our relationship to it.

TOOL = WEAPON

Caroline Garcia’s I woke up and chose violence transformed Recess into a ritual and collective holding space for confronting violence. The session offered an opportunity for her to survey and deepen a longer engagement with violence in her art practice, a project that draws upon her research into histories of guerrilla warfare and the ritual violence practiced by Indigenous tribes in her ancestral home of the Philippines. Her project asks: what does it look like to get closer to violence, to study it, to try to speak its language, or even to develop a creative practice around violence? And could such a project help a person exist in a reality that has been fundamentally shaped by colonial violence?

During the session, visitors and passersby encountered a larger-than-life image of a Filipino Guerrillera before they even entered Recess’s building. Her name is Nieves Fernandez. She had been a schoolteacher before the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in the early 1940s, but during the resistance she rose to become a highly-respected commander of a guerrilla army. On Recess’s glass entryway Garcia installed a large vinyl reproduction of a photograph of Fernandez next to an American soldier whom she engages in a first-hand demonstration of her fatal bolo knife technique; when executed correctly, it would result in the quick, near silent death of an enemy soldier. After Japanese troops invaded her community in Tacloban, Fernandez worked alone to ambush soldiers as they traveled through the jungle; her undeniable success as a solo fighter led to her organizing local men into a guerrilla army. Fernandez and her fighters had just a few American-made rifles, but were skilled at crafting improvised weaponry like paltiks: makeshift shotguns made with gas pipes, gunpowder, and nails.

By placing Nieves Fernandez quite literally at the front and center of her project, Garcia links her creative practice to a legacy of anti-colonial survivance shaped by Fernandez and other Filipino guerrilleras. Both in and beyond the 20th century, colonization and occupation deeply impacted land, language, and individual as well as collective life at every level in the Philippines. Faced with such profound dispossession, women like Fernandez turned to violence—not by choice, as there were no other options, only a singular means of survival. I woke up and chose violence pays spiritual tribute to this history of struggle, as well as the idea of matrilineal kinship that extends beyond a literal blood relationship.

In the photo of Fernandez with the American soldier, her left hand fiercely grips the hair at the apex of his skull, while her right hand, grasping her knife, rests the long blade directly on the skin of his neck. He appears to smile nervously, perhaps suddenly aware of his own vulnerability in her hands. The image illustrates how the relationship between a fighter and the weapon they wield can be both intimate and revealing, becoming an expression of the fighter’s personal essence or spirit; weapons help make our relationship to power visible. During one of my conversations with Garcia, she shared that she learned that for many women, weapons function as “equalizers” that compensate for slighter physical size and strength.

At Recess, Garcia led one-on-one sessions where she guided visitors through designing their own customized handheld weapon. She had curated a display of traditional fighting sticks and bladed armaments used in Filipino Martial Arts that were used as a starting point for a design. During this process, she invited participants to wield one of the training weapons while she took note of how they moved their body in relation to it and the “target” (punching bag), providing observations describing the nuances and quality of their movement when engaging with these tools. This somatic exploration progressed to a sketching session, where visitors continued a dialogue with Garcia about one’s capacity to engage in self-defense vs. offense, which she insisted should be reflected in their final design. Visitors were also encouraged to get as inventive with their concept as possible and imagine unexpected hybrids of everyday, familiar objects. When I participated in the exercise, this was the direction I took, imagining an umbrella that secretly contained a mace at the top and a knife in the handle (only after this did I discover that “self-defense umbrellas” had already been invented).

Garcia’s own speculative weapon designs, fabricated as 3D-printed objects, also served as a source of inspiration. They belong to a body of work she calls Tropical Dissent, and include:

1. An old-fashioned coke bottle that doubles as a club, or mace, studded with cowrie shells
2. An iridescent whip in the form of a miniature dragon, whose body is shaped from small, interlocking vertebrae
3. Crustacean-claw nunchucks, joined in the middle by a gold “Caroline” nameplate, modeled from her own necklace
4. Brass knuckles in the shape of crocodiles, with metrocards welded between each knuckle, each fashioned with knife-like edges

The bolo, the machete-like sword that Fernandez used, is also a hybrid object: it is a harvesting tool that doubles as a weapon. Bolos “had a wide range of use, from hunting to scything grass, opening coconuts, harvesting crops, or clearing dense brush,” and like the makeshift paltik shotguns also mentioned earlier, represent an approach to arming oneself that was improvised and D.I.Y., by necessity using only what was readily at hand or scavenged. These kinds of weapons offer counterexamples to the Western technologies of killing that rapidly took on machine-like capacities over the 20th century (with, for example, the introduction of the first automatic guns during World War I). As weapon technologies evolved, they effectively distanced combatants from the “enemy” and reworked the act of killing into an automatic process. I argue that Caroline Garcia chooses to recognize Nieves Fernandez as a kind of ancestor, in honoring her image and memory and “inheriting” her practice of improvised weapon-making. What does it mean to recognize one’s ancestor, even if that person may not be your blood relative? And how does this affect the story one tells about themself?

FRIENDSHIP BY FORCE

Guerilla warfare has a powerful presence in the history of the Philippines. After the Spanish-American war in 1898, Filipino insurgents across the archipelago sustained impressively long campaigns against American occupation, despite having few resources. William McKinley, the United States President leading the occupation, recognized that ideological tactics would be more effective within this stubbornly hostile climate than military force alone. So he issued what is known as the “Benevolent Assimilation” proclamation:

It will be the duty of the commander of the forces of occupation to announce and proclaim in the most public manner that we come, not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives in their homes, in their employments, and in their personal and religious rights…assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.

Across a complex, layered history of colonial violence and struggles for sovereignty in the Philippines, the idea that assimilation with the colonizer is “good” represents an especially chilling paradigm shift, the traces of which are still felt across the diaspora today. The covert violence of assimilationism is at the center of Marlon Fuentes’s 1995 film Bontoc Eulogy, in which Fuentes tells a fictionalized story of his “Igorot grandfather” Markod’s journey from a mountain village in Luzon to the 1905 St. Louis World's Fair. Dozens of native tribes were trafficked from the Philippines to populate an enormous, 47-acre exhibit at the World's Fair, which is considered today to have helped popularized the concept of a “human zoo.” Though many Indigenous tribes from other parts of the world were exhibited, including the Apache, Tlingit, and Ainu, the Philippines exhibit was promoted as “the over-shadowing feature of the World's Fair.” The Igorot village in particular was labeled “probably the most interesting single feature of the Exposition,” while the Igorot people were aggressively marketed to the public as “savage headhunters.”

For the Igorot, headhunting was a form of ritual violence with multiple social functions. It was often used to process grief and anger, and was also an instrument for obtaining justice when an individual or tribe had inflicted harm on another party. Misrepresented outside of its authentic context, though, it became the prefect form of sensationalized “savagery” to feed a white American imaginary fueled by fear. In Bontoc Eulogy, Markod becomes increasingly angered by how the Igorot rituals must be performed on demand, reducing them to spectacles whose only function is to entertain the white fairgoers. Eventually, he attempts to escape the fairgrounds, but is said to meet an unknown fate in the process and is never heard from again.

At the end of the film, Fuentes, playing a version of himself, attempts to find out what became of Markod, but the ending of his grandfather’s story continues to elude him. His search ends at the Smithsonian, where he wanders through an exhibit of human skulls. Could it be possible that one of the three Igorot brains preserved at the Smithsonian (in what has more recently been referred to as a ‘racial brain collection’) had once belonged to Markod? He observes “so many objects, identities unknown, labeled but nameless, anonymous stories permanently preserved in a language that can never be understood.” Though he has exhausted his search, he refuses to give up all hope. “If I don't find Markod,” he muses, “perhaps my children, or my children's children will. If they see him, I wonder if they will recognize him.”

TROPICAL DISSENT

Bontoc Eulogy offers a lament for diasporic alienation: the assimilated life spent severed from an ancestral reality, one that had existed outside of, and in opposition to, the reality of the colonizer. It was the colonial reality that promoted the myth of the Indigenous other as an “exotic savage” in the early 20th century—first for entertainment, then in the field of science, where historically Indigenous bodies were treated as specimens to observe and extract information from.

Confronted by this realization as he comes face-to-face with the rows of nameless skulls at the Smithsonian, Fuentes’ character comes to experience the museum as a site of mourning. He accepts the quixotic impossibility of finding his grandfather’s body, and by proxy, of filling the void at the center of his own life story. But he also holds open the possibility that his children and grandchildren could find (and “recognize”) Markod, suggesting that the ongoing search is about much more than locating a physical body. Adding to all of this is the fact that the real Marlon Fuentes, the filmmaker, created a fictional narrative around his “grandfather,” but the film’s documentary approach was so convincing that many audiences believed the story to be real. In the end, is an imagined ancestor any less real than a colonial myth, or an empty void? On the surface, our desire to disidentify ourselves from violence might look like evidence of social progress. But as Byung-Chul Han argues in The Topology of Violence, what we perceive as the disappearance of violence should unsettle rather than comfort us, as “violence is simply protean” and remains ever-present in forms we can no longer see:

Today [violence] is shifting from the visible to the invisible, from the frontal to the viral, from brute force to mediated force, from the real to the virtual, from the physical to the psychological, from the negative to the positive, withdrawing into the subcutaneous, subcommunicative, capillary and neuronal space, creating the false impression that it has disappeared. It becomes completely invisible at the moment it merges with its opposite, that is, with freedom.

Han suggests that violence’s apparent “disappearing act” in fact signals how violence charts new, viral pathways to assimilate into the mind and body. It’s an idea that resonates with Frantz Fanon’s writings on the phenomenology of colonial violence—how it covertly hides itself in language and becomes absorbed into the psyches of colonized subjects. Fanon says that the inherent violence of the colonial order necessitates a violent struggle for liberation; within the latter context, he argues, violence becomes a creative, “cleansing” force, the path to achieving true self-actualization. Violent dissent may be the only effective tool to counter the colonial logic of “freedom through benevolent assimilation”—an idea that indicates the United States’ treatment of the Philippines might represent the ultimate, dark historical example of the “frenemy.”

Dissent becomes a means of acknowledging violence’s invisible, viral presence and choosing to fight back, resist, and reject that which seeks to invade and destroy our beings. Caroline Garcia’s thinking around “Tropical Dissent” offers a model for recognizing and re-orienting one’s relationship to violence, particularly in how it tucks itself into the spaces of diasporic life through forces of assimilation. To “wake up and choose violence” in this frame, is to become aware of this psychic dissent and grief, and to transform it into a physical manifestation of force. Garcia’s Session activities provide the tools for participants to turn their own bodies, or whatever implement they have at hand, into that weapon.