Voices from the WTO

Blank Pages By Carmela Feigenbaum

I am an 18 year old student.  The real reason I went to protest in Seattle was to prove that I’m tough.  When I grow up, I am going to be an organic farmer.      

Blank pages are the most daunting things in the world.  I have to use this space to write about my experiences in Seattle a month ago.  But so much happened, so much I want to say. What is the single experience, the one most important thing that happened, that I learned, that I want people to know about?  What about this will I remember for the rest of my life?

Certainly I’ll remember the stormtroopers, the black-clad spectres that manhandled me and hundreds- no, thousands- of others.  Also, I’ll remember the jail, by turns freezing cold and overwhelmingly warm. I’ll remember GusBus, where I sat for 14 hours.  I’ll remember being strip-searched and humiliated and tear-gassed and shoved.

But then there was everything else- the street party, the music, the community, the support all around, not to mention the beautiful, strong women I spent five days with.  So I guess I’ll start there.  I spent five days locked up in the King County Jail in the company of the most amazing group of women with whom I’ve ever spent extended periods of time.  Strange as it may seem, I found something in jail I’ve been searching for: a close-knit community of active, intelligent, sharing, strong women.

This community was all the more essential, as we women were somehow pitted against men in the us-them / prisoner-guard society of the jail.  Sexual abuse of women in prisons has been documented again and again.  It is a fact that domestic violence rates are higher among police than among society in general.  The scariest thing that happened to me during all my time in Seattle was not getting arrested, or getting manhandled by the police.  It was when I was being transported from Sandpoint Naval Base to King County Jail. 

There were six of us women, all shackled with our hands cuffed to our waists in belly chains and our ankles chained so we could barely walk.  Our van was driven by two men- big and armed.  When we pulled into the garage at King County, we were confronted by no less than eight more male guards.  There were no women to be seen in this completely sealed, impenetrable room.  I was the first to get out of the van, and I could barely move- not only because of the chains but the fear of the power these men had over me. 

The only thing that got me out of that van was a whisper from one of the other women.  I don’t know who it was, or what she said- but I remembered suddenly the power we had together and knew that we were safe for the time being.  I was lucky.  Other women weren’t.  I know of more than one protester who was held down on the ground and stripped naked- by women guards! While a male guard watched.

The guard who booked me confiscated my glasses when I refused to tell him my name, so I couldn’t see too well.  But I can say without lying that the people around me were beautiful.  We came from different locations, different backgrounds, different cultures, and we were there for all sorts of reasons.  We all made different decisions and yet there was a very deep bond, and with this bond came strength and power.

We realized this power in many different ways.  There were many witches among us.  They were some of the strongest women there, maybe because witches make it a practice to connect with and utilize the power and life and energy which we all have.  At the beginning of my jail stay, during the booking process, I was held in a freezing cold holding cell, maybe 12' by 12' with 25 other women.  All of us were wearing only one layer of clothing, the rest had been confiscated.  When I was put in there, the group was pretty fragmented.  No one was talking much, everyone was miserable and the door kept slamming open and closed with people continually coming and going.

As time went on and we got colder and our requests for blankets were laughed at or ignored.  We started organizing to warm ourselves up.  We tried cuddling, spooning together on the floor, walking around- but nothing worked.  Finally, one woman said, “Wait.  We need to change this.  We have the energy in ourselves to warm this room.”

Following her lead, we all stood in a circle.  This accomplished two things: first, we were able to see everyone’s face and second, it blocked out the horrible concrete and cement room, the hard corners, the whole jail.  We created our own space.  Turning to each of the cardinal directions, we invoked each element and its energy.  We visualized this energy coming together and filling our circle and heating the room- and lo and behold, it did!  To finish, each of us sang our name- or whatever we wanted to be called- and the rest of the group sang it back three times.  And suddenly the room was warm, and we were a community.

We stayed that way the whole time in jail and we continue to be.  We kept our strength and sanity by singing and performing magic and checking in with each other.  We played games, and laughed, and hugged.  As time went on, it was more difficult to stay on top of things because we couldn’t see our lawyers and our information from the outside was extremely limited.  But every once in a while someone would say, “Do you know why we’re here?  Do you remember what is happening?  We’re winning.  We stopped the talks, and Seattle.  We shut down the WTO.”