Book Review

By Derryll White

Anonymous (2008).  off the map

“When we remake our images we remake our selves.”

This is a book I think a lot of my older friends should read.

It is derived from a zine written by two young women on a journey of discovery. They travel through a world few of us now understand – a world of squats and communes, a world populated with people of no fixed income. Many of the people I know look at the people in this book and immediately classify them as bums, welfare cheats and scam artists. In places such as Victoria, they are building malls outside the city centre so that residents do not have to encounter the people described in this work.

The young authors, Lib and Kika, have the temerity to suggest that the easy stereotypes might be wrong. Thinking back on the endless road quests of my own youth, both by thumb and motorcycle, I believe the truth and the personal need of the narrative put forth in ‘off the map’.

These two women colour outside the lines. They have courage, time and the will to explore the societal alternatives that will inevitably let them grow as individuals.  Mainstream society gets horrified, labels such movements as ‘Occupy’ and ‘Anonymous’ wrong, but the young women here are the kind of warriors that will expose the new possibilities after the fracking and monetary/environmental plunder of the current regime deposits us all on the lip of a social apocalypse.

The consistent story line is one of quest, a journey of self-discovery through a rejected world populated with the gods of acquisition, greed and possession. The questers are not beggars, not freeloaders. Sometimes they WOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms), but mostly they negotiate a vibrant counter-culture of anarchic communes and squats.  Why? Well, I think because they are trying to discover who they are, not as defined by general acceptance – advertising, image, capital culture – but as defined by their own needs and visions of a world of common acceptance and support.

Their needs are quite clear, although many may consider them deviant. They need to know what freedom is; need to know how to live as a person and not as a sexual object; need to know what the paradigm will be when the capital-based society cracks and crumbles. Are they dreamers – most definitely! Do they have beautiful dreams – I think so. They have replaced the billboards of corporate mythology with magic and self-realization.

Is the lifestyle in ‘off the map’ desirable for everyone? Obviously not! Most of us could never free ourselves of material culture cleanly enough to attempt the journey. But personally, I am very encouraged by the fact that there are still, in this material world, free spirits who will attempt an alternate lifestyle, who will explore the beck and call of the communal experiments of my own youth. The authors make me happy that there are still individuals who demand more from life than just ‘stuff’. But most of all I feel blessed that they took the time and the considerable energy to write about their odyssey in such a clear and compelling manner.

Would I recommend this book – only to those who are free enough of spirit to temporarily suspend the corporate models we have all bought into at some level, and to those who might want to contemplate an alternative. But to those few, I would definitely say “you have to read this book!”

Excerpts from the book

FUTURE – We still believe in the viability of dreams, in and through and around the stuff of daily living, and even as the bedrock for our most solid practicalities.  Dreaming is a dangerous proposition; it dares us to risk everything, to walk blind into the hills, to do the hardest work in ourselves and in the world – and to reap the richest reward.  Sometimes, possibly, our dreams urge us to reveal ourselves intimately to an audience of strangers, and hope they’ll meet us where we most want to be.

ALTERNATIVES – This is what it means to be an adventurer in our day: to give up creature comforts of the mind, to realize possibilities of imagination.  Because everything around us says no you cannot do this, you cannot live without that, nothing is useful unless it’s in service to money, to gain, to stability.

SOCIETY – When we peel back all the layers of pain and distrust and neurotic surface fears, what lies beneath is that infinite primal terror of being stuck forever with no love.  We have built our societies on the pursuit of success: traditionally that’s meant beauty for women and power for men, although increasingly these overlap.  Daily, we see around us the dismissal of the ugly, the weak, the old, the powerless.  So we know that one day it could and can and will be us who are dismissed.

SQUATTING – At its core, the squatters’ movement is always a story of resistance.  Squatting invalidates the boundaries of private property and sets immediate human needs before arbitrary law.  In doing so, it absolutely refuses two of the things, which are essential to any functioning capitalist society.

PERMISSION – Maybe I understand the idea of heaven.  Not a place you go or make up in your mind, not a blinding whiteness but the path of the light as it traces your own hours in the place you are.  Heaven, a place that you actually allow yourself to be, because you learn how to say yes to life!

DREAMS – It’s almost too easy to avoid living the dream you are in while questing for one more perfectly imagined.  Half of being a dreamer is dreaming and half of it is actually living in your dreams.

HISTORY – In America we see almost nothing that outlives us, “old” does not seem to exist.  We see the passing years as terrorists and it becomes easy to destroy our aging selves the way we destroy our aging buildings.  The young can’t learn from the old, can’t move in and inhabit their stories unless it’s done secretly, in darkness under lock & key.  Who loves old buildings in America?

EXCLUSIONS – It’s easy to become contemptuous of a place which has no room for you, which bars you from your most basic needs.  There have always been two cities, the visible and the invisible…

CHANGE – Once you begin to have some insight into the way things are actually moving —- once you open your eyes and you see the need for change, you either become a wise person, you turn inward and look for answers there, or else you become a revolutionary.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org .

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