By Lusinstrella
When I first discovered the Wooden Shoe I was pregnant (though nobody could really tell), Philly was covered in snow, and I was taking a short break after having been on the road for a month. I had embarked on a discovery trip from New Orleans to New York, through the major cities of the East Coast. I had seen Nashville and Memphis, Chattanooga and Washington.
The Shoe was still on 5th street and I stumbled upon it while roaming through what I thought was the first livable place in the USA. I was wearing a pair of military boots that proved inadequate to protect me from the bitter cold and I had on, in a multitude of layers, basically all the clothes I had 
brought with me from my beloved and warm Tuscan countryside.
I remember the clearly recognizable sensation of entering a male militant place.
The dark stuffy room crowded with books was nonetheless exactly what I needed at that particular moment in my life, after coming from the artificial neat emptiness of the southern suburbs, with their white wooden porches, where afternoons were spent talking about inconsistent, harmless idiocies and thinking of the next delivered meal and cheap canned beer.
My growing belly, relentless curiosity, and undeniable impulsiveness, together with a remarkable series of cultural, political and mostly linguistic misunderstandings created such an unlikely and unforeseen circumstance that I had ended up spending the entire fall and some of that winter in Louisiana, on the outskirts of New Orleans.
It could be the memory of my morning sickness, but I still get nauseous when something reminds me of those strange days. The whistle of a freight train slowly passing through the city. A series of identical and well-tended front yards disseminated with mini-American-flags, bird feeders/baths and other trivial signs of melancholic obsessiveness. The smell of those vicious artificial house perfumes that plug into electrical sockets and have the most improbable names – spring rain, mountain breeze, laundry drying in the sunshine – so ineffective at covering up the stale smell of cigarettes, old couches, liquors and endless sad nights spent in front of giant TV screens, trying very hard not to talk, to mask frustration, anger, passion and depression under a well spread coating of properness.
Mostly it’s that sensation of total estrangement and surreality, the inauthentic formalities, the wide and alien smiles that still make my head spin today and made me, on occasion, bang it on the wall back then. My road trip was an escape attempt from that privileged kingdom of plastic futilities and unhealthy food imposed on me as the banner of the American lifestyle.
Upon entering finally, that day in January, the dusty room of the old Wooden Shoe, I felt I could finally breathe. I knew exactly what to do, how to move. It was a familiar place with familiar people and it made me feel at home, in those days of excruciating nostalgia for all that I have always loved and always ended up leaving behind .
I remember buying a Wicca book of herbs and a whole lot of subversive t-shirts to send back home, mostly as physical, undeniable proof of the existence of such a place in the very center of the American empire. I was so excited about my find- an anarchist bookstore in full view, with sign and everything- in the middle of an American metropolis, that I could hardly contain myself!
It was 2004 and we were in the middle of a war that all the people I cared for had opposed with all our impotency and all our desperate determination. Bush, the most hated and yet most precise icon of capitalism, was President.
My friends and dear comrades back in Italy almost stopped talking to me when they heard of my intentions of moving to the States. They also considered the fact that I was having a baby with a Yankee, more or less, an act of high treason. They didn’t shave my head and paraded me naked through the streets though. The style had changed since the days of partisans and resourceful women selling themselves indiscriminately to Nazis and Allies – indiscrimination being at the core of their crime, since while it was somehow accepted to give an American soldier a blow job in exchange for a bar of chocolate, it was unfathomable to lay with a German one in order to survive. It didn’t even matter if they both had unimaginable – for us – blue eyes.
My baby’s father had unimaginable blue eyes, of course, and I was, not even secretly, hoping he would pass them on, together with his status and his seemingly safe, easy life. He didn’t, and when I happen to think about it, I still wonder about all that wasted blue.
Some of my closest friends went so far, in order to protect me from the consequences of my unforgivable distraction, as to let me know that, if I ever should change my mind about the identity of the father… well…they were there for me!
I had not been convincing evidently, not at all, with my argument that the only place where it would be worth the risk of starting a revolution was indeed North America, because until we could reclaim that territory, there was not a chance of us being able to accomplish anything in Europe. Not without provoking a military intervention on their part, and seeing our beautiful cities torn asunder by their bombs once again.
The truth was that somehow, and for reasons not entirely clear even to myself, I had really wanted all this. I wanted a child. I wanted security and I wanted to get away. Away from broken promises, disappointments and heartbreaks, but especially from the failure of a long struggle that had been my life from the age of 13 and that seemed to have met its definitive Death on the streets of Genoa. The wounds were still so fresh. Silence had fallen upon us and would not leave. America was just any place for me, good enough because distant enough. So, with a determination not unlike that of my World War II ancestors, I had jumped on the first available horse, together with a prince I didn’t really care for, but who cared for me enough to take me somewhere else. An action that was not all like me and, in the political context I was living in, profoundly incorrect but, just like those women in the war, I was ready to fake, grind my teeth and even live in a sort of suspension from my political beliefs, until I reached what I thought was safety for me and my baby.
What I thought was safety was only security. The security, for my recalcitrant self, of a closed coffin. As Harry Miller had predicted in Sexus, I had cut off my legs and acquired prosthetic limbs, so I wouldn’t feel the pain of my real flesh.
The first time I staffed at the Wooden Shoe, years later, with an impossibly big and active toddler at my side – living proof that northerners’ genes are a whole lot to handle on us Mediterranean people- I brought with me some incense to light, because, in my opinion, the store felt like a male space. Not that incense is, necessarily, an object charged with femaleness, but at least it made the place smell better.
Through the Wooden Shoe I met a lot of people and was able to find out and eventually connect with most of the other anarchist spaces in the city. Without the Shoe, it would have been far more difficult for me to continue with this kind of political activism so far away from home.
Today my level of involvement is almost scary for somebody like me, who brought home from the school of Autonomia an inherent refusal to belong to any kind of political organization. Autonomi or Loose Dogs, that’s what we used to call ourselves, to indicate the fact that our political actions were to be considered always independent and never bearing the trademark of parties or movements of any sort, even though we might at times and peripherally, support them. It was, of course, a resistance to bureaucracy and to structures, always more or less hierarchical, more or less sclerotized. In the Italian context, it was also the only way to relate somewhat sanely to the Communist Party and its meticulous and centralized organization. Actually, to the Anarchists Federation and the Tute Bianche as well, all falling, even in the way they occupy space, in the same pathetic mimicry of the worst bureaucratic structures, with the same people sitting at the same place on the podium at every meeting and with no real turn over in the central roles.
If you asked me why I stayed this time around, I would tell you that I don’t want the store to close down. For me, as cheesy as it might sound, the world feels a little less depressing as long as a place like this can go on existing. Maybe I somewhat changed and the Wooden Shoe changed too, both as a physical space and as a collective. We no longer reside in the dark room of 5th st and have rented a new location with purple walls, breathable, wide space, with old granny style armchairs and a kids books section. It is even somewhat clean.
As a political experience, this is much more than simply a book store and you wouldn’t believe the incredible amount of work and dedication necessary to make it work, the energy and passion that is concentrated in this project.
How can it stay open then? What are the political practices that allowed it to survive for more than 35 years?
The main reason, as I see it, is that the Wooden Shoe could be run in almost all its aspects by almost any of us collective members or staffers.
Of course, sharing knowledge is what we should always do to keep at bay that instinct to fascism that Deleuze and Guattari talked so much about to describe our imprinted desire to be leaders and/or to follow leaders. And it works too. In fact, even though seniority in the collective can confer a special aura, in a place where everybody has access to the knowledge around it, that power remains on an abstract level.
I have being hanging out in radical spaces for pretty much half my life and always found some sort of charismatic or strategic leader, usually a man, who had a lot to say about the appropriateness of political practices and the correct radicalism index of random ideas. Of course I never liked it by instinct, but only now I realize with clarity that it’s not just about me not being a follower by inclination, but also about the reification of acquired practices, the opposition to a power structure and a bureaucratic organization that makes change more difficult.
I can stay in this collective because I feel it changing, continuously changing and because I feel that I and anybody else involved has the power to change it. I’m not trying to say that we do not have a long road ahead of us and a lot of work to do to try and dismantle some of the oppressive power dynamics we all grew up in, but I know that everybody there is willing to do the work, willing to be confronted and willing to learn new ways.
Sharing knowledge, finally, is not only more sustainable in the long run, it also makes it more difficult for us to simply die out, either because of some external form of oppression or from internal lack of energy. In other words, we are all easily replaceable, just in case we decide to move on, end up in jail for direct action, or somebody decides that one of us should be shot dead while sleeping. Of course we do not do, as a collective, anything dangerous to the point of deserving such special attention, but I still bear the marks of Genoa and the clear memory of the funeral we had to chant for our struggle. Now with the NDAA gloomily hovering over our horizon, and this general atmosphere of brutal repression, it would be worth opening a dialogue about effective resistance strategies, so that whatever they’ll decide to do to any of us, it will be really hard to crack down the movement this time around.
