Losing Land

Eva Hagberg

My friend Amanda Armstrong can’t come on campus anymore, unless she’s there to study or teach. Unless she’s there, in the words of the Alameda County DA who charged her four months after their police beat her as she linked arms with her fellow protestors to protect an encampment put up on November 9th of last year, on “lawful business.”

  
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YouTube Direct: Occupy at Cal, uploaded by MilesMathews

Come to think of it, it’s not only this Berkeley campus that she and twelve others aren’t supposed to step foot on, but any property owned by the University of California. Apparently, this is to stop her—and anyone else who was suddenly charged at the beginning of March, arraigned on criminal charges four months after she was videotaped having batons jabbed into her ribcage—from protesting at events like Regents’ meetings (where they generally approve massive tuition hikes) or participating in protests at other campuses. What ends up happening, though, is an absurd Orwellian world in which she can’t go to People’s Park, an enclave five blocks from campus that’s currently—and has been for the last thirty years—occupied by the homeless of Berkeley.

In an open letter (link here) published on Berkeley Nov 9, a blog devoted to covering the aftermath of the events of November 9, 2011, in which Alameda County police attacked and beat students who had formed a circle around a tent in order to protect its occupants from eviction, from the public grounds of this public university, three of the arrested students pointed out the following:

“The stay-away-order-plus-exception effectively distills our lives as students and workers from all other trivial or superficial aspects. We are reduced to mere academics, without political or social lives, whose sole purpose is to work and study and return home. We cannot attend a lecture on campus. Or meet with a friend for coffee. Or stop to talk with a former student. And we most certainly can’t attend any protest.”

It’s this stay-away order, this control of access to public ground, that is one of the most distressing elements of this entire, very distressing series of events. And it sheds light on the most basic of architectural and landscape questions. Whose land is this? Who decides who gets to go on it? And what does it mean when you are suddenly not allowed to place your body on a parcel of grass or concrete that, just a few days before, were public, and therefore yours?

I’ve been reading a lot of environmental history in a seminar with the historian Kerwin Lee Klein, and one of the first books that we read was about forests in England and France, and about who got access to those forests. We had to walk our way through to the answer as Klein pushed and pushed and pushed us to figure out why the peasants couldn’t get onto the king’s land. Forests were defined not in the way we colloquially define them now—as groupings of trees often with nice walking paths—but solely to delineate hunting grounds on which the king and his guests could prey on deer. Citizens who weren’t among the king’s invited guests weren’t allowed into the forests.

It wasn’t so that they wouldn’t accidentally get shot or shoot someone else. It wasn’t so that they wouldn’t take the deer that were meant for the king. It was so that they wouldn’t get access to weapons.

And that’s what this stay-away order feels like. The weapons that we have now are our bodies and our speech, and it is clear that the administration is afraid of the way in which we’ll use both. I almost wrote “wield” them, but then I realized the violence in that word, and this is not about us being violent.

I wasn’t there on November 9th, on the day that everything happened, but I was there a few days later when hundreds of students gathered on Sproul Plaza to find ourselves facing a phalanx of armed riot police. I almost wrote “cops,” but that’s the thing about Occupy here at Cal, when what we can use is our words: every single word matters so much (it always does, of course), as does, it seems now, every single square of occupiable (pun intended) land. One of the questions that night was about tents or no tents, about whether we should try to formally occupy the space once again by using this symbol of the larger occupy movement, or whether we should simply informally occupy it. One of us proposed that everyone simply lie down, and occupy this ground, which should be our ground, not with tents but just with limbs and fingers and the backs of our skulls. The body had become the landscape of protest: the reason my friends were beaten, the reason my friend Zak’s finger was broken and Amanda’s ribs were bruised, was that the university had seen their behavior as “not non-violent.” The university saw their linking of arms as a sign of attack, as their own phalanx, and so for the next few days images of Martin Luther King linking arms with supporters popped up on doors and walls and cork boards around campus, particularly those in Wurster, the architecture building, where we felt a sense of even larger responsibility.

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YouTube Direct: Floating Tents Occupy Cal, uploaded by redstartstudio

It was the landscape students that took charge, and it was the landscape students that floated tents above Sproul Plaza one amazing day last semester. They had designed their way around the restrictions the university had placed on our abilities to occupy, and with it came the idea to just lie down on the ground. Tents became such a lightning rod issue, seemed almost to bait the administration, but here and there people began to propose the idea of occupying the space without tents, simply with bodies. And last semester, as the temperatures lowered and protesting fatigue set in, a few remarkable people slept on the steps of Sproul, warmed only by sleeping bags and their desire to be seen.

I’ve been proud to be a part of the Wurster community and there’s been a sense around Wurster, the building that houses the College of Environmental Design, that we are some of the ones who have to speak up, that we are the ones who need to use our understanding of space and place and how important it all is to help push the conversation forward. Our dean, Jennifer Wolch, sent out an email before the March 5th Sacramento protest saying that she hoped to see us on the buses. There’s a way in which our activism feels like we can come at it from an angle, from a seeing of space.

I’m thinking, and very seriously, of leaving school after this year. It’s a combination of factors, some of them general and cliché, some of them that feel so specific that they must be cliché. My mother wrote to me the other day after I sent her an email thanking her for supporting my decision. She talked about the cynical approach to scholarship I’ve found, the lack of financial support, the way in which I feel as though the thing I’m supposed to do—write, with enthusiasm—is seen as secondary to the path of being trained to be a professor. But she also knows that deep below those very real concerns is the desire not to be a part of a university that will stand behind the removal of its own students, that will keep away the people who contribute to its intellectual life.

I walked through campus yesterday and I thought ahead to this fall, when I don’t know if I’ll be coming back on campus for classes. And part of me was already sad, already nostalgic for this moment that I knew I’d look back on. I talked to a friend of mine about my decision to leave. “Nowhere else can you have this kind of community of people doing amazing things” he said. “Are you sure you want to go?”

I’m not sure, and in part because there is an amazing community of people. But there’s also the truth that part of this community of people doing amazing things is no longer being fostered by the university. My friend Amanda is smart, and thoughtful, and deeply involved in finding what’s right and then fighting for it. The fact that the University of California, Berkeley, does not see fit to recognize her for it, sees fit instead to stand behind the actions of an increasingly aggressive and vindictive police force, means that this community of people doing amazing things is perhaps physically on top of the ground that they stand on, but no longer occupies it in the way that they should. This land was our land. Now, it’s lost.