Sexist aggression and hierarchy of struggles in Bure

Testimony originally published at https://nantes.indymedia.org/articles/46383

don’t know how to write this text without letting sadness overwhelm me. But I’ll do me best.
On 31/08/2019 two bands where I play were invited to perform in rue de l’eglise n. 4 in Bure. We had to drive 4 hrs to go and 4 to come back to Liege.
I was so excited to go there as I still didn’t go to this place, and we were playing for the release of the fanzine ‘Freakszine’.
I was expecting a nice party and as I arrived I started to jam with some people improvising stupid songs to laugh. I felt home.
When the 1st band with me in it started I was singing on the left side. People were doing some pogo and giving me and the other singer some distance so that we could move too. One of the people doing pogo was dancing too close and hurted me with his elbow a couple of times while coming too close to me, so I moved a bit further, and he came back stepping twice on my cable (my own material) so that I had to put the mic back. After a while, again his elbow went too close to my eyes so as the song finished I told him to watch out and don’t come too close to me.
After the show the whole band was happy. I was standing close to the distro and the guy came to me asking me :’why you didnt want me to do the pogo?” While answering ‘I didn’t say not to do this but…’ he left like provoking that what I have to say was not important. He comes back immediatly and he ask aggressively the same question, so I answer aggressively that it was about my fucking cable and his elbow, and he leaves again while I speak. So I tell him it’s a typical sexist way to react. The guy then comes to me and says ‘then you are racist!’.
Then I was shocked. He left, to come again and say ‘sorry, I will leave’. He didn’t , instead he put me against the wall calling me RACIST while I was searching for a beer to go sing with the next band. The others were getting ready on the stage in the room next to us, I tell him he’s crazy about this racist stuff just as I am opening my mouth to tell something that was wrong in his behavior, so he come really close to me, like he wants to beat me, I know he will, but I decide to stay and face him. Instead he first spit 3 times on the ground close to me and each time he tells me :’ you are racist’. I tell him ‘you really show you are a strong man doing this’ – then he slaps me really hard and pushes me to the wall. There was somebody around : my friends to who I say ‘hey he slapped me!’
And my friends come in my defense, I run to the other room as I imagine what was going to happen : the local people of the house come to defend him and accuse me to be racist !
As my friends try to talk with the people, apparently slapping girls is ok, but telling a colored person he has been an ass is not ok! so we were all racist, in once, while the guy was beating everybody up, drunk as fuck, even his own roommates or friends.
Some of us tried to talk with the locals and apparently the guy is excused as he’s drunk, colored and traumatised, and in the house there are some people that says the white people (they all are as well) can’t defend themselves.
That made me completely angry and I dropped their soap and some meat and cheese they had around in the room on the ground, plus some fanzines, saying that this is not what they preach, this is violent.
I saw the guy hitting my friend, my partner and another friend that came with us, and she is also visibly not white.Then I saw another (white) guy going to my partner saying ‘shut up I am anti-white’. I asked everybody to stop talking and hurry up with leaving!
Git, the organiser was crying so I told him it wasn’t his fault but he should not accept that this people are free to behave like this.
He and other people of the house then told us that it was not the first time he was violent. And that they were angry at him, but also afraid of him.
This is not our responsbility if this guy had a shitty life and experienced discrimination.
It doesn’t give hime the right or the excuse to disciminate back and to assault people. And being drunk is the worst excuse
possible. And assuming i was francophone and belgian because the band is located in belgium can also be labelled as racism.
While we were trying to put back the backline, this guy that was told to leave was coming back to me again, but instead of hitting me, he was hitting the van of one of the crew, where the dog was sleeping, so she was terrorised and started barking.
In front of the evidence, the locals said ‘we didn’t hear nothing and see nothing’.
We left around 00h and slept at a friends place after 2 hrs, to go back to Liege the day after.
After the self defence adrenaline went away I couldnt breath and couldn’t stop to cry, thinking about WHAT THE FUCK is going on in this so called anarchist and activist world! That people make wars to the wrong people for the sake of who controls us and wants us to hate each others, people invent stories to put others down, false stories that should not be, wrong words, story told from person to person that become bigger…anarchy is dead!
I just have panic attacks since we left and I hate to admit I am weak.
But I wanted to talk about what REALLY happened as a lot of people could testify, and to put away this weight from my heart as I breath like shit since this aggression.
Open calls to racism when you just do bullshit and you are sexist and the first violent discriminator in the place, is really, really lame and disrespectful. And we don’t understand that most of the people from the house were showing us that for them, anti-racism is a more important struggle than anti-sexism.

09/11/2019