A Tale of Cassie McCuish and other fashionless anarchists
During a regular coffee date my wife and I take, a friend laughed about me attending a Rainbow Gathering. Evidently he thought it was hilarious that someone like me would attend an event like this. Of course, this fellow, in his defense, thinks that he can tell who a person is based on their clothes and manners. I usually permit this as I play the game as well as anyone. I dress and behave like a “white male professor” and allow my teaching and social commitments to speak for themselves. But judgments sting.
Why should they not really, I’ve been judging myself for a long time and transforming myself into a better image of the “white male professor” during my PhD. It shouldn’t surprise me that I am judged to be so and therefore a member of the educated class and distant from the anarchist communality that makes the Rainbow Gathering special. But symbols tend to get in the way of things. Take for instance Cassie McCuish.
I don’t remember much about Cassie McCuish. She was an elderly gaelic speaking relative who we used to visit. Cassie lived in a small house in Loch Lomond Cape Breton with a few cats. Her first language was Gaelic and her english was heavily accented even for a Cape Bretoner. My father still caries the music of language in his voice when he wants to. So do I, but I keep it hidden away. Rural accents are impediments. They get in the way of being recognized for your skills and intelligence. An accent restricts you. With an eastern Canadian accent your heard to be a story teller or a comedian, not a university professor, musicologist, or critical thinker.
Cassie, with her musical speech, was not a fashionable anarchist. She would likely have thought me crazy to suggest that she was political at all. But I learned a great deal about anarchism from that generation. Not anarchism in the Negri-Hardt sense. Not even in the Direct Action sense. Cassie’s unfashionable anarchism was born of a life outside of representative government in a world where local people lived a life of commitment to each other.
I don’t want to mislead you. There was nothing special about Cassie necessarily. bell hooks in her new book Belonging: a culture of place goes a great way towards describing Cassie, even though hooks had never met her. Reading hooks description of the rural anarchists in the hills of her native Kentucky was like reading about my family living on the next farm. I suppose bell, that I am the great-grandson of those people. Those bigoted white stubborn anarchists who lived off the land and by their own rules.
I suppose it makes sense after all. From the hills of Kentucky to the backwoods of Cape Breton and all along the rural coast of North America we came and settled here. The other “we”. Not the powerful elite we, but the foot soldiers of colonialism, we. Not the soldiers and merchants that built the towns but the other ones pushed off their homeland by famine, enclosure, or the dream of progress. The nameless people who enacted the great colonial invasion. Nameless. Let me give one a name. Let me call her Cassie.
Perhaps visiting Cassie was my first real political education. My father would bring me with him to visit the place where he spent his summers, Loch Lomond. We would drive past the farms and drop by the folks that were still there. The smell of boiled tea, strong cheese, and bannock will always trigger the image of a line running off the front porch back to the outhouse, and the name Kenny Cameron. The magic of symbols. How the smell and touch of these little images combine. They don’t in-and-of-themselves make any sense. But they become infused with meaning and finished later. And sometimes they remain guiding questions. What does it mean to have these as memories. Why does the the memory of Cassie’s singing speech cause me to weep quiet tears. What is hiding behind these images, behind these symbols? Sometimes I feel that I am walking into an ambush of my own design. Or of a design by my elders.
My political education began when Cassie read aloud a birthday card she received from then Nova Scotia premier Donald Cameron. She recited the birthday greeting and a congratulations for achieving such an advanced age. Her pitch raised in incredulity showcasing the magic of her lilting speech: “Imagine getting a card like this, I’m not this old yet…and I didn’t vote for him either!”
Everything around Loch Lomond whispered tales of a community and of people that lived their lives together in a dance with this land. A community of people who looked to each other for support and looked down on intrusions from “outsiders” and those that “come from away”. I understand this anarchism – this way of being in community without a state. I think there is something really healthy about taking responsibility for your actions in the world and for each other. I think we could use a bit more of this fashionless anarchism.
