He adjusted the input gain by a single decibel. Something to do.
Above him, Doe Library thumped at its familiar register. He listened to it the way he sometimes listened to rain.
TWLF_69_Interview_Reel7_Raw.wav — Transfer 34% complete.
Box 15. Preservation priority: High. (8/8)
#BerkeleyTapes
"The University wants to put us in a folder somewhere and close the drawer. We are saying: the drawer stays open."
Damir stopped. He knew the timbre of a voice speaking from inside a siege. He had been that voice, once, before he learned that silence was the safer instrument. (7/8)
#BerkeleyTapes
Just doing his job.
Above his desk: a photograph of the Rose Garden courts taken from the Bancroft terrace. The bay visible beyond the hills. He had put it there two years ago, when he'd started playing again. A reminder that he could.
He did not look at it now. (6/8)
#BerkeleyTapes
He realigned his pens. Three of them, parallel, three cm apart. He was aware he was doing it. He was aware of why.
The Axiom officer on Oxford Street. The tablet. His unhurried patience. The way he'd looked up when Damir's ID cleared. Just confirming. Suspicion unneeded. (5/8)
#BerkeleyTapes
Level C. 58 degrees. The mineral smell of the HVAC. Beneath it the deeper smell of the collection: acid-free folders, paper kept from light for decades.
Damir had worked in this room for eleven years. The smell still reached him. Some days it was the closest thing to a prayer. (4/8)
#BerkeleyTapes
He named the files onto an encrypted drive, the one that did not connect to the university network, the one Praxis Solutions could not touch.
TWLF_69_Interview_Reel7_Raw.wav.
Standard preservation protocol. Redundancy. Best practice. He did not call it what it was. (3/8)
#BerkeleyTapes
"The University does not see us. You understand what I'm saying? Not our history, not our communities, Us. We are asking for the right to determine what our own education looks like. That is not a radical demand. That is the minimum." (2/8)
#BerkeleyTapes
The tape was fifty-three years old and still had a voice.
Damir threaded the oxide-brown ribbon through the playback head with two fingers, the particular delicacy the old Ampex required. Behind a membrane of hiss, a student from Berkeley, January 1969, spoke into his skull. (1/8)
#BerkeleyTapes
The 50th Anniversary Edition cover of Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed. Background has a bold red pattern with a grid of pink squares. The title, "MUMBO JUMBO," is printed in large, black, distressed block lettering with the author's name, "ISHMAEL REED," appearing below in the same style. Several white lines radiate upward like a sunburst from a yellow trumpet bell at the very bottom of the cover. A yellow banner at the top reads "50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION" and a silver "National Book Award Finalist" seal is visible in the bottom right corner.This copy is part of the "Bay Area Prophets" display curated by Chloe in the hallway outside the Bancroft Library.
“Orthodoxy is my Doxy, Heterodoxy is the other fellow’s Doxy.”
- Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed.
Level C. Fifty-eight degrees. An archivist. A fifty-three-year-old tape. A voice that has been waiting.
#BerkeleyTapes #SpecFic #BookSky 🧵
The ProPublica piece. The letters. I Never Saw Another Butterfly. These things were made so the walls wouldn't be the last word.
Gustavo asked us not to forget. We know he's there. That changes what forgetting means. (12/12)
propublica.org/article/life-inside-ice-dilley-children
Adults argue about policy. Children write and draw and sing about what they can no longer touch. Power comes for the drawings, but the drawings survive.
Don't call this optimism. It's just what keeps happening, across every wall, in every era. (11/12)
On the U.S. border, La Santa Cecilia recorded "Ice El Hielo," the children crying at the doorway when their mother doesn't come back. Songs preserve memory. They pass through walls that drawings can't. (10/12)
youtu.be/0lNJviuYUEQ?...
In Gaza, children are singing a Tarweedeh, a Palestinian folk form that women once sang near prisons with words scrambled so guards couldn't understand them, but prisoners could.
Songs engineered to pass through walls. Children still singing them. (9/12)
www.tiktok.com/@ajplus/vide...
This tradition did not begin in Terezín. Enslaved children sang "Many Thousand Gone" (no more auction block for me) as witness, as mourning, as memory. Power has always come for what the silenced make. The silenced have always found another form. (8/12)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEdP...
The confiscation was really about the drawings working. Because a child's hand telling the truth is more dangerous than almost anything else. (7/12)
Thirteen-year-old Gustavo Santiago, detained far from his home in San Antonio, wrote:
"I have friends, school, and family here. To this day, I don't know what we did wrong."
He ended with: "I just ask that you don't forget about us." (6/12)
What children do under confinement (across contexts, across centuries) is reach for the one specific thing the walls have taken. A butterfly. A color. A pair of UGGs waiting under a Christmas tree. Things they had before a life interrupted. (5/12)
In 1942, Pavel Friedmann wrote a poem in Terezín about the last butterfly he saw inside the ghetto walls.
"Butterflies don't live in here, / in the ghetto."
Those poems and drawings were hidden, smuggled out, preserved. Officials would have destroyed them too, if they could have. (4/12)
That memory doesn't belong only to my culture. It belongs to every culture that has survived oppression, enslavement, genocide, and chosen to hand the knowledge to its children anyway.
The mechanism is the same. So is the instinct of power to destroy what the children make. (3/12)
Cover of "...I never saw another butterfly..." features children's drawing of a village with red-roofed houses nestled among green and yellow hills. Below the artwork, the title is printed in a serif font inside a cream-colored, wavy-edged parchment box. The bottom half of the cover is a solid dark green, containing white text that identifies the book as a collection of children's drawings and poems from the Terezín Concentration Camp (1942–1944).
I grew up with stories like these, given to me deliberately. I Never Saw Another Butterfly, the drawings and poems children made in Terezín, the instruction to never forget.
Instilled trauma, like an MMR booster. I carried it whether I wanted to or not. (2/12)
The children's drawings in that piece hit me.
A 9-year-old named Maria Antonia drew herself and her mother wearing their detainee ID badges. In the margin: "I am not happy, please get me out of here."
Then the officials came and took the drawings. (1/12)
This week I learned that staff at the Dilley detention center raided cells to confiscate children's drawings and letters in retaliation for a @propublica.org piece that published them.
I've been thinking about that ever since.🧵
www.sacurrent.com/news/san-ant...
It watches the empty room now.
The split doorframe. The poster. The floor where Marcus's phone lay face-up while his mother's voice came through the broken glass.
Recording. Archiving.
Somewhere in Richmond, Marcus Chen is being processed. In Room 237, he never existed.
(17/17)
#BerkeleyTapes
At 9:47 p.m., one hour after the battering ram, an Axiom technician mounted a Persistence Lens in the corner of Room 237.
He was in and out in four minutes.
The red light began to blink. (16/17)
#BerkeleyTapes
Back in room 237:
The door hung off its hinges. The battering ram had split the frame, torn the deadbolt from the wood.
On the wall, the poster still there:
BUY MORE. BUY MORE NOW. BUY. AND BE HAPPY. (15/17)
#BerkeleyTapes
The van started moving.
Through some crack in the door: a sliver of light.
Marcus turned his swollen face toward it. Trying to catch one last glimpse of Ridge House. The phoenix mural. Home.
His eyes wouldn't open. (14/17)
#BerkeleyTapes
A voice in the dark:
"Marcus? Marcus Chen? Is that you?"
He tried to answer. His throat was raw. His tongue swollen.
"It's okay," the voice said. "Just breathe. Try to breathe."
But breathing hurt.
Every inhale, fire in his ribs. Every exhale, synthetic vanilla and copper. (13/17)
#BerkeleyTapes
They threw him into the van.
Two officers, one motion.
He landed on his shoulder. Something popped. In the darkness: breathing. Crying. Someone retching. The smell of bear spray and blood and piss.
The door slid shut. (12/17)
#BerkeleyTapes
Outside: the processing zone.
47 residents lived at Ridge House. By 9:15 p.m., 38 were zip-tied on the grass.
Leo saw Marcus being carried like a gym bag.
"He wasn't even there! He stayed home! Check your fucking list!"
An officer just moved toward him.
Leo went quiet. (11/17)
#BerkeleyTapes
They lifted him.
Helped him up? No. Lifted. Like a piece of luggage. Two officers, one at his shoulders, one at his knees.
Blood from his split lip dripped onto the hardwood, marking the route like breadcrumbs.
Down the stairs. Out the door. (10/17)
#BerkeleyTapes
