Epilogue: Continuous Movement

Abstract

May 2008: I am in Los Angeles visiting Wesley Days. Before his class on capoeira and facilitation, I wander through the University’s campus where I discover yet another checkpoint scene. A Palestinian student coalition has set up this mobile scenario; it is, in my estimation, a crude and excessive representation. The ‘guards’ here bear their guns menacingly, waving them in the faces of submissive ‘Palestinians’, reiterating an extreme projection of the oppressor/oppressed narrative that limits transformation. YetI find myself defending the image when a witnessing student contests it: ‘That’s not what happens. The soldiers don’t hold their guns in your face like gangsters.’ I get caught up in his provocation, the need to prove my own (limited) experiential knowledge. ‘Yes, they do. Sometimes they do. I’ve been there.’ And I have, but I have not seen anything like this image. I just combat his energy with a rebuttal. We argue back and forth, rooting our point of view in fragmented experiences and narrow ideology.