In the year 1990 AD, a woman gave birth in a high-rise Philadelphia hospital. The doctor hefted the boy pressed his bare ass against the window, mooning the city. The child, named Blake, grew up in Oreland, a suburb of Philadelphia, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, one of the United States of America. Blake’s parents were both journalists. His mother and father treated each other as equals and governed their relationship according to democratic ideals. They treat their children as lawful subjects. Blake acted moody and stubborn, lazy and mischievous. He made friends occasionally, with some prompting, but tended to linger on the edges of social circles, eyes full of dreams.
Oreland was a leafy town in Springfield Township, gritty and polluted, full of mechanics and bars. “Philadelphia” means “The City of Brotherly Love” in Greek, apparently. Springfield Township, and much of Pennsylvania, was taken by force from the Lenape nation by William Penn, an agent of the Crown of England, in a notorious deal called “The Walking Purchase,” which exploited the Lenape peoples’ historical unfamiliarity with contract law and colonialism. “Pennsylvania” means “Penn’s Woods” in Latin. The United States of America is named for Amerigo Vespucci, an enigmatic Florentine known for his accounts of voyages to the “New World.” By all accounts, it is possible that he never existed.
His parents got him diagnosed with Oppositional-Defiant Disorder, a conduct disorder which includes irritability and hostility to authority, but not generalized aggression, theft, or deceit. He received cognitive behavior therapy but not family therapy. He got detentions and lectures, but he never got arrested. In fact, Blake excelled in school, particularly in English. He went to college and studied English Writing and English Literature, double majoring with honors. Blake’s father died of brain cancer. He’d been whimsical and fair, a guitarist, a writer, and an editor.
Blake enlisted in the Peace Corps and taught English in the Republic of Namibia. For two years, he lived in Bagani village, on the banks of the Kavango river, with the Mbukushu people. Although the work and the heat exhausted him, he felt strangely happy every morning when he woke up.
He returned to the United States and got a job delivering packages during the Christmas season. One evening, at the end of a long day of work, he jumped out of the truck and felt a sharp pain shoot up his spine. It took him weeks to recover. At that time, he was 25. He lived at his mother’s house. She bustled around the house and taught him yoga. On the weekends, his friends from High School came to visit him. When he got better, they walked around their cold, quiet town where there was nothing to do. Everything seemed far apart. Everyone seemed cold and neurotic. They watched horror movies and planned petty crimes and infiltrations.
He decided to go to California in the Spring. It seemed like the normal thing to do: directionless, one must travel across the country. Surely the West hid some reserve of freedom. Blake was certain he could fall into some glorious adventure, but nobody wanted to join him. Some of his friends had jobs. Others had lovers.
None of this is quite true.
The Republic of Namibia adopted its national constitution in February of 1990 and received independence from South Africa in March of the same year. Formerly known as South-West Africa, Namibia had been a colony of Germany and England as well. Germany engineered one of the first modern genocides there, using armies, concentration camps, poison, and dehydration to kill hundreds of thousands of Herero, Nama, and San people. The European empires mainly colonized the central part of the country, dry bushland where malaria could not spread.
The Mbukushu, Ovambo, and Kwangali people, far in the north, mostly avoided this genocide. The Namibian War of Independence, however, lasted from 1966 to 1990 and was mostly fought across Namibia’s northern border. The People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) hid in Angola and sent forays south to skirmish with South African Defence Force (SADF) soldiers. You can still see the ruins of a South African bunker in Bagani Village. Most of the older people in that village were taught Afrikaans by white men who proclaimed their own superiority and carried guns in their classrooms.
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In the year 1972 AD, Thimemba was born in Andara village, just a few miles from Bagani. Her name means “Thunderhead” or “Approaching Storm.” As a child, she ran through the village every day. She never liked the Catholic priests or the Afrikaaner teachers. At night, she would sneak across the river to play with her friends in the ruins of a Portuguese fort. Andara was also the birthplace of Joseph Diescho, author of “Born of the Sun” and “The Role of Education in the Politics of Control in Namibia: 1948–1988."
Thimemba made Brenda Fassie CDs and sold them. When she grew up, she moved to Rundu, a major town, to pursue a music career. She made experimental dub and reggae. She dated a businessman who turned out to be an alcoholic, then left him for an underground reggae artist. She borrowed a van and went to Windhoek to buy new releases, then copied them and sold them all over the country. At a bar in Swakopmund, she played a legendary rendition of “Proud Mary,” in the style of Tina Turner. Thimemba never made much money from her own music, but she built a recording studio in the deep bush. Pretty soon, she ended up single again. Years later, however, the reggae artist contacted her and invited her to visit him in Oakland, California.
None of this is quite true.
For about 20,000 years, a variety of nations lived around a series of bays, at the mouth of a mighty river. Some of their names were: Miwok, Patwin, Karkin, Chochenyo, Tamyen, and Ramaytush. Many of these nations are now known as Ohlone.
Beginning in the 1750s, soldiers of the Crown of Spain and missionaries of the Franciscan Order built a series of forts and missions in the lands now known as California and Baja California. In 1769, a military expedition led by Captain Gaspar de Portolá, the first Governor of California, departed northwards from the San Diego Bay. This expedition searched for a bay to use as a foothold for colonization of the land they called Alta California (“Upper California”). The soldiers were accompanied by missionaries led by Junípero Serra, a former inquisitor with a penchant for self-flagellation. They found a bay and named it San Francisco, after the founder of the Franciscan Order. There they built a fort, El Presidio (That Which Presides), and a mission, Dolores (Sorrows). Spanish soldiers captured most of the Indigenous people in the area, including the Ohlone and Miwok nations and many others. The soldiers forced these people to live in the mission, where many of them died of malnutrition. The soldiers raped them. The missionaries forbade them to speak their own languages or practice their own religions. Those who escaped were hunted down and recaptured. By 1833, Spain had built 21 missions in California. During that century, hundreds of thousands of Native people were killed and tens of thousands were enslaved.
By the 1980s, many cities had grown on the Ohlone Bay, including San Francisco, Palo Alto, Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, San Rafael, Petaluma, Napa, and Sonoma. The valley of California was filled with smaller towns, mostly agricultural. Los Angeles made movies.
A boy was born in Los Angeles. His parents gave him up for adoption. He forgot the name they gave him and called himself Merlon. He grew long hair and learned to surf. He hitchhiked around the country and hung out with hippies. He got an exclusive contract for the maintenance of MTV’s fish tanks, then refused to work for them. That’s why they can’t have live fish on MTV. Later, Merlon lived in Golden Gate Park, beneath the Presidio, and sold jewelry that he made himself. He resided at times in the San Leandro and Santa Rita prisons.
In 2007, investment banks caused a financial crisis with predatory loans and risky investments. Federal investigators never prosecuted the responsible parties, companies which received trillions of dollars of bailouts. In 2011, Merlon camped for weeks outside the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco with members of the Occupy movement. He grew fierce, cynical, and skilled. A few months after the police dispersed that camp, Merlon traveled to Berkeley, at the request of local activists, to occupy the Berkeley Post Office, a historical landmark which the United States Postal Service intended to sell to Staples. Through the actions of Merlon and others, that sale was eventually blocked. Merlon met Selena, with whom he founded First They Came For The Homeless, a movement which resisted Berkeley’s criminalization of homelessness. She had a way of remaining cool and collected, poetic, directing Merlon’s anger towards noble causes.
None of this is quite true.
