IN DEPTH// Aaron Hughes and Amber Ginsberg’s Tea Project: Confronting Systemic Racism & the Global War on Terror, Over Tea
By Michael Workman
Performed in locations as disparate as a sidewalks in Chicago, a gallery in Tokyo, and their Veteran’s Day staging of the event at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Tea Project has opened a space for an important conversation about racism, both domestic and foreign, endemic to the global War on Terror. I sat down recently to discuss it their performance art project with the collaborative artist duo of Iraq war veteran Aaron Hughes and Amber Ginsberg, a lecturer at the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I take it, from your description of the tea project, that on some level it’s about trying to focus the national conversation on our sense of collective trauma; do you feel like your experiences on tour in Iraq left you traumatized? And do you feel like our culture effectively respond to that, and in what way is that, or is it not related, to what you’re doing with the Tea Project?
Aaron: It’s definitely all connected and related. I have a V.A. rating for post-traumatic stress disorder. I think, in a lot of ways, our whole society is dealing with different kinds of trauma from the fact that we’ve been at war for so long and, dealing with the structural violence of our society, and I’m interested in constructing this space that can connect those dots. Perhaps use some of the sensationalizing of veterans’ trauma to deconstruct that narrative and reconnect to the notion that we’re all struggling with these issues and living through these experiences. I hesitate to make this project or any project I’m involved with about therapy or directly about healing. I mean, I think healing is a very important thing that we all need. But we need survival as well, and I think a lot of times these terms “healing” a “therapy” and “trauma” tend to de-politicize situations that are extremely political. I think there’s a lot of power dynamics involved that we’re trying to negotiate in this project and acknowledge, and to acknowledge how we fail at dealing with them a lot of times. How I failed at dealing with a lot of the problematic structures of power through the military when I was deployed. That’s even a part of why I never accepted tea while I was deployed. I didn’t have tea with Iraqis or third-country nationals or Kuwaitis because we were told it was a security threat because we were told it could be poisoned and underneath all of that was really this racism and Islamophobia. I’m interested in holding a space to acknowledge how these situations arise, where people’s fears get so built-up that they can’t accept a cup of tea. And what is the reason to accept a cup of tea, and what does it mean to offer a cup of tea? What does it mean to these Iraqis who have live through these occupations and lost a great deal of their dignity and they still have this gesture of hospitality? I know this is a long statement and maybe not helpful —
No, it’s extremely helpful.
— but it’s just that at the end of Guantanamo Diaries, Mohamedou [Ould Slahi’s] lawyers comment that even after this book that documents his torture, his extra-legal detention, his extraordinary rendition first from Afghanistan and then later on to Guantanamo, later on he says, “I wish and I hope everyone whose been mentioned in this story and in this narrative reads it and corrects any of the mistakes, that one day we can all sit down and have tea together and talk about all that we’ve learned.” And to me, that’s such a generous offer of hospitality from someone who’s lived through so much violence and is still detained in Guantanamo.
Amber: Can I just add one thing to this? About this question of trauma or however you want to frame it. You know, working with Aaron, our dynamic is really interesting because I’m in what is generally termed a “civilian” position, right? If you’re a veteran, the complement term to veteran would be civilian, or citizen, or some other way of differentiating from not having participated in the military and the longer I’m in the project, the longer I’m resisting that binary. I think we are all as citizens and as veterans — and this term, I’ve been trying to find language for which I’m now calling “non-veterans” — as a citizen and non-veteran, I’m deeply implicated and ever-involved in the state of war that were in. And so, when we sit down and have tea, all of these things that are in place to separate our experiences through language and definition, those are the kinds of binary structures we hope can get dissolved in these kinds of moments, or work to get dissolved in these moments.
So, it’s a sort of awareness of the military-cultural intersectionality that you’re pursuing.
Yes. Exactly. Very well put.
I agree with you, and if this is to some degree protestation against those binaries and the systemic evidence of them, how much of it is social, how much of it is part of the cultural divides that you’re encountering? I’m not sure that’s something you can speak so much about outside of actually engaging in the performance, but I’m curious.
Aaron: I think in some way it’s up to others to determine — some people might call it protest art, some people might not — I feel like it narrates based off of perspective and relationship to the piece. I do think we are trying to push back on some of the overarching political and cultural narratives in our society and create a space for people to share how those dominant narratives affect us not only for veterans but especially for all the individuals that have been affected by these wars domestically. Whether it’s the equipment that I never even had, or coming home to police departments in the United States or the fact that a lot of the targeting of Muslim, asian, black and brown communities that have been targeted overwhelmingly by our domestic and foreign policies, I think all these things, these wars don’t necessarily just exist in some far-off land. They exist in the refugees that come here, they exist in the fact that right now, the NSA is collecting our cell phone data, you know? So it’s something we’re all negotiating.
Amber: The other thing that I’d maybe resist — maybe not resist, but question — about this notion protest art is how one of the things about the performances themselves, of offering tea and prompting questions from very personal stories, is how it elicits other people’s personal stories. While this is a performance, it’s also an invitation and there are very, very few spaces where we’re good at holding disagreement. So it’s not that the performance particularly advocates a given position, it’s a way of talking about things that don’t get talked about, so responses to these performances — who’s there? The politics of the people who are there isn’t wholly pre-determined. It might be partially pre-determined by certain proclivities, but it’s not wholly pre-determined so it’s not clear tat everyone in the audience is against the Iraq war or against these other things. If we took a stand of a protest position directly, that eliminates the possibility for contradictory voices to exist in a single space. And Aaron can speak to this better because he tends to have more of these responses, but there has been criticism of the kind of space that’s held as being far too one way or the other — not enough of one…I don’t know, Aaron, you have some good examples of this.
Aaron: Right, while all that’s true, the intent is not to be neutral. Not to not acknowledge power dynamics. It’s about challenging the overarching narratives that exist, especially around — you know, the veterans aren’t the victims of these wars, the people who live under the occupations are — and there’s an overwhelming kind of denial of their humanity, and this is ultimately about trying to find different ways of acknowledging their humanity, which is really about acknowledging our own humanity. And there is pushback when people say things that necessarily are — for example, one woman in a performance refused to take a cup, even though she was really interested in the whole performance but in the very end refused to drink out of a cup because it had a name of one of the detainees on it — and she said “Oh, I can’t drink out of this. I didn’t know it had to do with these terrorists!” And that opened up a space for discussion about and we’re not saying, “Oh! We’re not going to agree that, oh! Now they’re all terrorists because someone said that.” It’s more a question of, “what informs that? What makes you believe that? Let’s look into some of the facts of the situation. And now that you now these facts about how people were detained, how people were extralegally detained, and extraordinarily renditioned, all these layers of how people were brought from over 48 countries around the world to Guantanamo, not just Afghanistan and Iraq, not just individuals who had any kind of relationship to any kind of violent organizations, many who worked with NGO’s in Afghanistan, now that that’s on the table, now that we’ve talked about these individuals already — ” because a part of the dialogue is about talking about the POW camps that existed in the U.S., Chicago during WWII, which were Nazi POW camps, Italian and German POW camps filled with soldiers, out of those POW camps came love stories, and on Sundays Catholics and Lutherans would go provide Mass and potlucks. So what are the facts that let us humanize in that situation? But we can’t even acknowledge the humanity of this supposed enemy today? Why is it that these supposed enemies have to be in Guantanamo and can’t b in a POW camp down the road the high school kids can ride their bikes over to and blow kisses to all the young Muslim boys that are in Guantanamo?
Amber: And that’s a reference to — it seems like almost everywhere that we’ve spent a significant amount of time and do research, because there are so many POW camps — when we were in Lawrence, Kansas where we were casting the cups, there was a POW camp for primarily Italian soldiers and it turns out they had actually worked in the factory where we were casting, making 15,000 cans of canned vegetables a day to be sent overseas and there was only 1 ordinance in the city of Lawrence during the specific time that the POW camp existed, and that was that there needed to be a boundary and a perimeter around where the camp was, because young girls were coming and blowing kisses to the young POW’s. So these stories that are deeply embedded in local culture emerge and provide this connection to this form of tremendously effective kind of “otherizing” in the wars that are happening now and against the people against which they’re happening. And so, always trying to bring back the humanity of the actual single, individual people that are affected.
That reminds me of the problem of the Homan facility, this “blacksite” facility we have here in Chicago, which seems to have been weirdly sort of accepted by the public, such that there doesn’t seem to have been as much of a public push as there could’ve been to explicate what’s happened with it, with all this discussion of interrogation and rendition connected to that facility. And that’s a great jumping-off point for my next question: what are your thoughts about the global War on Terror today? It’s still happening. What’s different and the same about it in terms of how it resonates with your project and knowing that it’s propped up on this systemic racism, how do you go about getting rid of it?
Aaron: I think the first thing you do in terms of how you go about getting rid of it is just to acknowledge it. I don’t think that there’s any sort of mass acknowledgement that we’re at war and that it’s this global war on terror, not specific countries, not specific people, it’s an abstract idea resulting in really a blanket permission of our state and our military to really exceed its constitutional powers. The idea that we’re going to win a war based on this abstract concept is pretty flawed, as seen through the continuing lack of strategic clarity from the military.
Amber: I so agree with Aaron that the first thing is to just really acknowledge the fact that we’re at war and that there’s this sort of this teeter-totter, so not only bringing to light that this is happening to families, to communities, to individuals, not just in this other place. This isn’t something that just happens to terrorists. This happens to environments, where countries are left without trees and have 140-degree summers, and then the flips-side, the other side to the teeter-totter of that is that we have incredibly anxious young people who have no funding for their education because of our military budget. The idea that it’s all happening “over there” to this abstract concept, I just absolutely agree with Aaron, first and foremost to acknowledge that we are at war and what does that entail? Taking the time and space to think about what that entails — there just isn’t room being made in our lives for that.
Aaron: And I think that a lot of communities that are directly affected directly or indirectly by the policies of the global War on Terror and dealing with more of the targeting going on of specific communities, and specifically of the Muslim community, their voices aren’t necessarily heard and so part of the project is making sure there’s a space where this cross-dialogue between how these wars, how these policies have affected people in their lives on a daily basis for the last decade plus.
Amber: And I think there’s been a shift in the project in the last maybe 3 years of really recognizing that there’s a lot of reason those voices might not want to go public at this time but also that they’re not heard. Specifically, for our Links Hall performance, we’re really grateful and excited to be collaborating with the Council on Arab-American Relations and with Radio Islam and that this project, where we’re bring people together, and where we’re bringing together communities that might not otherwise — lots of organizations are working on human rights issues, but may not necessarily have the time or the opportunity to come together and that’s what the Saturday night tea engagements are, where we’ll have a really diverse kaleidescope of voices from the folks who have done incredible work in Chicago on the John Burge reparations and the Black Lives Matter, connecting that with activism and culture that’s happening in the Muslim community and connecting the relationships not just between the militarism that’s happening there, but in the prison-industrial complex that’s happening here and how that affects our communities. But I do think that the lens of thinking about Islamophobia in relationship to the global War on Terror is something that has increased in the project over the last few years.
“The Tea Project” takes place at Links Hall, 3111 N. Western Ave., Chicago, IL 60618. (773) 281–0824. Performances take place March 31-April 16. For more info visit tea-project.org; for a full schedule and reservations to limited-attendance events, visit linkshall.org.
