first day

Airports are strange things.  They embody precariousness, as exploited by that overly-hyped George Clooney movie Up in the Air.

In my Intro to Postcolonial Lit class last semester, we read a book called The Global Soul by Pico Iyer.  There was a chapter on airports, but to be honest, I skipped it because I found Pico Iyer to be insufferably annoying.  But if the global soul is that class of people privileged enough to find a home en route to countless destinations, then they depend on the the seen unseen, those laborers whose work is non-valued in service of the global city, work done by women of color.  Spivak, re-presentation, etc.

Right now, I am in the Casa San Juan in Nicaragua, in a very wealthy neighborhood in Managua.  A few blocks over, people sell less-than-appetizing-looking fruit on the side of the road, and street children toss grass flowers at tourists with the hope (or expectation?  or neither?) that the tourists will toss them money back.

All of this is making me think about space and visibility, and how there could possibly be room in a city for a group of citizens of the empire to wander about the [protected parts of the] streets.  According to the safety talk we had today, we are highly noticeable on the streets.  Visibility strikes again, but in a different way.  And when the program talks about "piropos," or cat-calls, that women, both Nicaraguan and others, endure on the streets, it makes me think of how patriarchy extracts value from a certain kind of enforced visibility, while sacrificing safe spaces (if patriarchy ever had that in mind to sacrifice in the first place).

Anyway, day one down.