Here’s a peak at some of what I am reading this week:
87 Deceased NFL Players Test Positive for Brain Disease.
Battle for (NFL) Benefits Pt 1
Battle for (NFL) Benefits Pt 2
content warning: Was I raped? Brutal assaults by strangers are unambiguous. But what should a woman do when she is the victim of an ‘almost rape’?
Mixteco Heritage Cookbook (pdf of fantastic cookbook!)
Penn State’s front line, 2014
Sunrise,
accept this offering,
Sunrise.
~Ceremony (Leslie Marmon Silko)
A Timeline of things I didn’t know
I have so many questions about the things I didn’t know. Why does the US never seem to really talk about or memorialize what happened in the Pacific even as we glorify and memorialize and celebrate D-Day every single year? Why are the only dates I really know for WW2, D-Day and the days that the US dropped the atomic bombs? Why did I never hear a recording of Truman’s ‘victory’ speech? Did Truman know that his speech would become US policy? Did he suspect how many presidents would use his language to justify their own wars?
Did he know this ‘victory’ speech would probably do as much harm through justification as his decisions to ok the atomic bombs did during the war?
—
In the US, you can’t get away from WW2. Rosie the Riveter is plastered on women’s studies department walls throughout the country, the History Channel is constantly running the WW2 marathons. Steven Speilberg can’t stop making movies about the war, and every bad guy in the history of the movies is a Nazi or a Nazi in disguise. We cheer ‘paying back’ Japan for Pearl Harbor at soccer games, and we dream of returning our cities to their WW2 ‘splendor.’ We still after all these years, are supposed to hate Yoko Ono.
The Greatest Generation is the idolized parent, the one whose standards we know we can never quite live up to, whose courage, self sacrifice and stoic nature are the stuff of legends.
We can’t escape WW2 in the US, and yet, most here in the US are like me. Not aware of major battle names or dates. Completely ignorant of war fronts. No clue when the war actually ended.
How can you live in the US and not know basic facts about WW2? Well, it’s hard to see what’s right in front of you when your head is filled with justifications.
—
I am sitting at a large wooden table at the local university’s archives. Boxes and dust and hundreds of bulletins from the Unitarian Universalist Church in Detroit surround me.
The church began publishing the bulletins in the early 1900’s and did so all the way through till the 2000s. There is a trove of historical information in them: what young people did for fun during the Depression, how the church started their own school, what the church thought about first one war, then another, then another and another. The first church bulletin I find about WW2 has this entry (I’m going to quote it in full, it’s short):
Sunday, June 11, 1944
A Church of The Unities and Universalities
The brotherhood for which a church of the unities and universalities stands ought to be something more than just a happy generality. It ought to mean something with respect to our attitudes on this question of race. Nothing is more disastrous to human personality than many of the conventional attitudes.
We are told the story of a wounded soldier being brought home on a train. He was a Negro. He was very seriously wounded and there came the time when it was quite evident that he could not survive the trip. The doctor had him placed in a private compartment and was seated beside him. “Doc,” said the soldier, “There’s just one thing I’d like. If I’m going to die, I’d like first to hear the voice of some one from Georgia.”
The doctor went out and traveled through the entire train seeking some one from Georgia. After a long search, he found just one person who spoke with a good Georgia drawl. She was a charming young thing, good to look at, and very evidently from a family of culture and background. The doctor told her of the wounded soldier and of his request, but when he revealed the fact that the soldier was a Negro, the young woman refused to go.
Such things our social attitudes have the power to do to use. Like the young lady on the train our social attitudes have a great deal to do with making us what we are.
At first, I bolt through the story, so excited to find something new, something not seen so often it is crusty with mythology. Then I reach the end and my eyes go back to the beginning read it again. This time slowly.
I notice the expectation of ‘comfort’ that the machine of war put squarely on the shoulders of the women, I notice way the woman is described (good to look at, charming), I notice how value is given to the “Negro” because of his participation in militarism (and I pause to try to remember who wrote about citizenship and black people–was it Baldwin? Douglass? Both?). I notice that this young man who lay dying is called a Negro. Even by somebody who is trying to help.
And I also notice a question. Right there at the end, so insignificant, I almost don’t even see it. “Like the young lady on the train our social attitudes have a great deal to do with making us what we are.”
Our social attitudes have a great deal to do with making us what we are.
Our attitudes make us what we are.
Who are we? And who do we want to be?
I find three other bulletins from WW2. They all ask the same thing in one way or another. (from the first bulletin after Pearl Harbor: “Life goes on and on. Despite the chaos of the word around us–indeed, BECAUSE of it–the Church School of today must plan for the world of tomorrow. The toddlers in our nursery will become, in a few short years, men and women who will have a share in guiding the destiny of our community, our country, our world. WE are laying foundations in our Church School in this year of 1942-1943,–foundations upon which may rest a better, happier, more peaceful world. Our boys and girls are the stuff of which those foundations are made.”)
Who are we? Who do we want to be?
When the war finally ends, the church bulletin asks point blank, ‘What now?’ What kind of world do we want to build, now that we must get back to the business of living rather than killing?
They are the questions left behind for the living–the traumatized, the heart broken, the betrayed. Who are we? Who do we want to be?
They are questions I never knew that The Greatest Generation asked much less tried to answer. The Generation that did things with stoic calm, without question, without thought, because it was the ‘right thing to do.’
—
There’s no end to literature that reflects on war. And yet in the US, even literature that directly reflects on WW2 is not culturally understood as an analysis of or reflection on WW2 or the universal questions that WW2 shoved into the face of the entire world. I learned in high school that Slaughterhouse-Five was a critique of Vietnam. I learned in college that Catch-22 was too.
But those dusty old church bulletins clicked a distant memory in my brain. A memory of words that I had read once. On an impulse, I gathered up books that I could remember studying in school, started rereading them with those questions in mind. The questions that my mind already shifted into The Questions every time I thought of them. Who are we? Who do we want to be? What kind of world do we want to build?
First on the list, Slaughterhouse-5. Then Catch-22. Then because I saw the really bad movie based on it one night, On the Road. And then I remembered something, and went to Catcher in the Rye.
Hidden behind the ‘insanity’ and ‘dark humor’ and ‘counter-culture’ and ‘depression’ narratives that usually frame these texts, lurk The Questions. We’ve seen the worst–what now? Who are we? Who do we want to be?
It doesn’t surprise me when I find out that all of the authors of these texts are WW2 veterans.
—–
When WW2 veteran, Eugene Sledge, saw the play, South Pacific, he walked out of the theater before it was over. It was too much. The dancing, the singing, the laughter. Laughter? In the Pacific? During the war?
In Sledge’s book, With the Old Breed, he tells of his time serving with the Marines during WW2. He tells of walking by a dead body, seeing it in different stages of decay each time he walks past.
Of seeing US soldiers scavenge the bodies of still living Japanese soldiers, a knife slicing into the mouth of a struggling man, in an attempt to extract the gold fillings.
Of seeing civilian Okinawans blown to bits.
Of seeing a dead US soldier with genitals in his mouth, shoved there by a Japanese soldier.
Of being so terror-filled at the relentless shelling, he had to use the constant repetition of prayer to keep his mind in his body. To stay sane.
It makes sense that sitting in a theater, hearing laughter, about a time that nearly broke him, that it was too much. An insult that simply could not be born.
And yet, as I watched the play for the first time (I had only seen the sub-par movie until that point), I saw The Questions again: What now? What sort of people do we want to be? What kind of world do we want?
And indeed, I found out that Rogers and Hammerstein deliberately put those questions into their play. There are two couples in the play, each couple has to negotiate race in some way. In both cases, the point of view is from a white perspective, a man and a woman. But the play doesn’t let these two off the hook. The white lady loves a French man but then finds out he has Polynesian (or, as she says, ‘colored’) children. She breaks it off with him. And then is made to look herself, everything she’s always just accepted, and her actions square in the face.
The white man sings about how you’ve got to be carefully taught‘ to be racist. And immediately breaks of his relationship with a Polynesian woman. He doesn’t have enough guts to bring her back to the US. Back home. We see that he has been taught very well. That as much as we want our brave soldier to be his own man, he has long since fallen in line and now does as he is told.
White USians didn’t like You Got to be Carefully Taught. Politicians in Georgia tried to ban the play and any plays like it. Theaters refused to show the play in front of desegregated audiences. Rogers and Hammerstein responded to criticism by saying that the song was the reason they wrote the play. They refused to show the play anywhere that theaters weren’t desegregated. The song stayed in the play. Theaters were desegregated.
What kind of world do we want? Who do we want to be?
The Questions were not a single philosophical rumination by a single minister in a single church in Detroit. They are not the subversive ramblings of inaccessible writers that hippies read while high in a tent at week long music festivals. The Questions were the driving force of pop culture, of counter culture, of religious culture, of political culture. The were the questions of the living. Of the traumatized, the heart broken, the betrayed. They were the questions of the people.
—-
As the 70th anniversary of the surrender of Japan has come and gone, there’s been scant reflection in the US on WW2 or ‘war’ in general. The usual thought pieces on the ethics of dropping the bombs made the media circuit and with them came the now normalized pictures of atomic destruction–the ‘before’ and ‘after’ maps, the massive mushroom, the little boy’s tricycle.
The thought pieces wonder, was the bomb justified? Those on one side assert with profound indignation that ‘no’ the US was not justified in dropping the bomb. They point to the decision making process behind making the bomb and how the US really wanted to scare Stalin more than anything. Or they point to the picture of the little boy’s tricycle. And argue nothing could possibly justify that.
Those on the other side point to the vicious defense of homeland by the Japanese. The incredible loss of life for US soldiers and non-Japanese civilians. This side also points to the Samurai culture for good measure, to the cultural code that created and accepted banzai and kamikaze attacks as legitimate methods of fighting. They draw the conclusion that because of the Samurai culture, the loss of life during a ground war in Japan would’ve been catastrophic. And so the bombs are justified.
For most of my life, I’ve been in the first group, the profoundly indignant group. It wasn’t just that I was horrified by the pictures, devastated by the loss of life, overwhelmed by the implications of such complete destruction–it was also that I noticed that Japanese people were brown. And that the bomb hadn’t been used against anybody else. And that The Greatest Generation still called Japanese people “Japs” or “Nips,” well into the 80s. And I felt that the bombs were racialized violence used by a white supremacist nation to control the uncontrollable brown people.
These days, I can see where the other side is coming from. Japan wasn’t fucking around. Every single thing I’ve ever felt or thought or that I’ve ever read from scholars about the bombs being used against brown people because they were brown is absolutely 100% correct. And Japan still wasn’t fucking around. They intended to win that war by any means necessary, and they used a terrifying level of grotesque means. USians like to focus on what was done to US soldiers (Eugene Sledge gives about the fairest accounting that I can find), but the Japanese were pretty grotesque to almost everybody they encountered.
Knowing all this, I understand better. That it was racism and white supremacy AND anger and fear all mixed together into a toxic narrative that justified the bomb, not once, but twice, to US soldiers, lawmakers, civilians.
But the thing is. Of course there is something that can justify violence. Of course there is. If Japan hadn’t fought to the last man and it hadn’t shot and killed a bunch of nurses standing on a beach and it hadn’t performed experiments on soldiers and civilians and if it hadn’t done everything it did–we still could find a way to justify any violence we perpetrated. Just ask the Okinawans. In the US, anything can be justified. War most of all.
Which means that if you want to stop war, you’ll need something more than profound indignation and the wrong questions.
—-
People in the US know this picture. It is part of our consciousness. It defines us to ourselves, and we hope to the rest of the world. It is a beautiful image. The taut body of the first man, the one closest to the bottom of the pole. The hips of one soldier resting in the curve of the body of the soldier in back of him. The hands in the air of the last soldier, caught in such a way that he could be just finished helping push the flag pole upwards or maybe waiting to catch a falling flag in case something happens to the others. It is an intimate picture, even though the men are all nameless and faceless. It speaks of all that the US hopes to be. Self sacrifice, courageous, working together for the betterment of the world. Young, masculine, beautiful physicality.
But even this picture that represents us to ourselves has it’s own story. There was a lot of controversy over who was in the picture (Ira Hays told the truth, even as the military tried to silence him), and with the exception of Navy Corpsman, John Bradley, all the men in the picture either died in later fighting or lived miserable lives post-WW2. For various reasons, all those who survived the war grew to resent the attention they got for being in the picture. And a large part of that resentment stemmed from how the military used the picture and the men to service it’s own needs.
As the Secretary of Navy at the time said shortly after the flag went up, ‘the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years!’
This flag raising, this intimate culturally defining image of the raising, wasn’t only used to rake in millions of dollars to cover the cost of the rest of the war. It wasn’t just used as a feel good morale booster to give USians the will to make it through what would be months of more war.
It was also used to justified the installation of a standing military in the US, something the US hadn’t felt it needed in almost 170 years–remember that the US had no standing military until WW2. A standing military needs money, and that picture opened the doors to untold levels of military funding. Because a threat to the US was a threat to what that picture represented. Our brave next generation–our ‘boys,’ who only want to make the world a better place. Our most sacred values, our most sacred citizens. Any response to a threat against our best is justified. Necessary.
That picture justified 500 more years of military and it justified eternal war, just as surely as the firemen raising the flag on top of ‘ground zero’ almost 60 years later did. It justified transitioning the US to ‘the strongest nation in the world’ just as surely as President Truman’s speech justified continued military ‘interventions’ into Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Wars can always be justified. Sometimes all it takes is a picture.
—-
“What now?” asks the traumatized Billy Pilgrim.
“What sort of people do we want to be?” asks the heartbroken Holden Caulfield.
“What sort of world do we want to live in?” asks the betrayed John Yossarrian.
What is the point of ‘life’? If life can be destroyed, just like that? If it will be destroyed? If destruction of life is the goal?
The plan?
On the 70th anniversary of a war that saw the destruction of millions of lives–that saw the rape of millions (another thing I didn’t know, this ‘new world’ was built on rape), are we any closer to answering these questions? Do we even know that these are the questions we must be working to answer?
—-
Let’s dig into this question of justification. What is it asking, really?
Is [bombing, war, militarization, a standing military, etc] justified?
What are the missing parts of this question? What does this question assume we understand without needing to be told? Let’s break it down a bit.
The most powerful nation in the world.
We get lost in the question of ‘justification’ the same way we get lost in the magnitude of the atomic bombs. Yes the bombs were world changing. Yes they were devastating. But because we never look at what air bombing did to cities across Japan, Germany or England, we forget that war in general is devastating. And we forget to ask if war in general is justified.
Slaughterhouse-Five was about the fire bombing of Dresden, which saw the loss of 22,000 to 25,000 people. German air raids on British cities led to at least 40,000 deaths. It’s estimated anywhere from 85,000 to 200,000 died during US bombing of Tokyo. And these are just the ‘big’ air bombings, the most well known. The US practiced a military strategy of extensive air bombing before finally sending ground troops in–the French wrote of despising the US for this, especially because the US couldn’t manage to hit a target. Even Japanese soldiers, largely protected from the bombing because of their intricate bunkers, complained of the effect of the endless bombing on morale, how they couldn’t hear themselves think, for days and days at a time.
What did this practice of ‘bomb then invade’ have on the populations living through it? How many lives were lost? If the US never dropped the atomic bombs, would the US’s relentless air bombing campaigns have been justified? Of course they would’ve been, people will argue, because of Hitler and the Jews. Of course they would’ve been, others will say, because of Pearl Harbor, or because ‘they’ attacked ‘our way of life.
The reasons behind ‘justification’ become a type of fetish–a ceremony to preform every year, with the atomic bombs or Pearl Harbor or Hitler or any number of justifications acting as a mirror to admire our masturbation with. I feel very good about myself because I can clearly see that these bombs were not justified ! I feel very smart because I can see that we were justified in dropping those bombs!
I feel good about myself!
—-
Is that who we want to be?
Is that who we, the people, want to be?
What kind of people do we want to be?
—-
There are consequences for allowing ‘Is this justified’ to center the discussion about war. We must keep doing this, we must stay strong and keep going, we must not give in to the terrorists who hate us, we must keep always always always growing our military. We are justified [in doing what we want], because ‘they’ are a threat to our way of life. We must bear the burden of this eternal war in the name of the Greatest Generation.
The Greatest Generation that was stoic and didn’t complain and sacrificed willingly and never ever talked about their losses, ever. The Greatest Generation that did what they were told.
Only they didn’t.
Did you know:
That there was a strong anti-war movement in both the US and Japan pre-WW2? Or that men took off, experimented with drugs, and tried to drown in bepob/hard bop and cool jazz after the war? Or that Divorce rates skyrocketed?
Or that there were race based protests and rebellions in cities across the US throughout WW2? Black soldiers were killed on the home front all through WW2. Returning soldiers of color just couldn’t accept the injustice, not anymore than Eugene Sledge could accept the laughter. Black soldiers came home after the war ended and lead voter registration drives and desgregation efforts.
And then there were the factories. To say that men were put back in the factories because women weren’t needed anymore and things could return to ‘normal’ (i.e. misogyny), is only partially true. It was also an effort to control the men. To make them get up every morning, come home every night. To saddle them with an always pregnant wife and lots of hungry mouths to feed.
Because what would happen–to everything– if men refused? If all the men took off and road trains and went on days long benders? What would happen if men ‘wallowed’ in their pain? If they admitted they were in pain and couldn’t move? If they said they couldn’t, wouldn’t do it anymore?
Men were often institutionalized and lobotomized. More often they were socially shamed by wives and families for not being ‘real’ men. For being ‘weak.’ General Patton once slapped a soldier suffering from PTSD for being a ‘yellow coward.’ They made a movie about Patton after the war was over. It is considered by many to be a great movie, one of the best about WW2. It is still shown on TCM and you can watch it on Netflix.
The man who was slapped? I couldn’t tell you his name without googling, or what happened to him or his struggles with the trauma of war. Did he survive?
Was the great ‘stoic’ generation really ‘stoic’? That is: were they a generation of people with a philosophy that allowed them to willingly bear great adversity without prioritizing their pain? Or were they a generation of people who were systemically terrorized, shamed, and threatened into silence? Into doing what they were told?
—-
In J.D.Salinger’s book, 9 Stories, he has multiple stories that deal with WW2. Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut is the story of a white woman in the suburbs, stuck in a loveless marriage and who loved a boy once. The boy she loved was a soldier killed in a freak accident during the war. His life rendered meaningless by his meaningless death. The woman’s drinking, loveless marriage, her inconsiderate treatment of her black maid and her daughter, all ask over and over and over again, ‘Is this it?’
She punishes everyone around her because from what she can see, the answer is ‘yes.’ This is it. The American Dream is everything but love. Or a meaningful life.
In the end, through tears, she asks her best friend, ‘I was a nice girl, wasn’t I?’ It’s a question of the still living, the traumatized, the betrayed. She did what she was supposed to do, she is still doing what she is supposed to do, holding up the system with her marriage, maintaining the system with a child she feels ambivalence for. She was a good girl, and she is still profoundly miserable.
She is the girl in the story from the church bulletin all grown up. And she doesn’t know how to escape the misery that has iced her into this life.
—-
I read a book about rape in France during the US occupation. I was surprised to find a story about Mamie Till’s husband and Emmett Till’s father–Louis Till. From all accounts, he was a troubled man, and his relationship with Mamie was filled with violence. After he repeatedly violated a restraining order Mamie filed against him, the judge ordered him to choose between going to jail and joining the military. He chose the military, and was shipped off to France as a part of a segregated military that only found use in black men in so far as they could bear menial labor.
While in France, Till was accused of the murder of one woman and the rapes of two others. Given his relationship with Mamie, it seems pretty likely that he was guilty. But as this book points out, 83% of the soldiers tried and convicted of rape in the European theater were black, even as they made up only a small fraction of the military and rape was rampant throughout any region where US troops were stationed. A Jim Crow military did not have the stomach to put white service men on trial. Not our boys, who sacrificed so much, who were so courageous. Black men whose only job was to dig trenches, on the other hand, were quickly and easily sacrificed to bureaucracy. To show the military was ‘doing something’ without it really doing anything.
Mamie Till didn’t find out that her husband was found guilty and hung until after Emmett was dead. During the trial of the white men who murdered her boy, Louis Till was used as proof, as evidence, that Emmett Till was no good. Like father, like son.
The “Negro” of the story from the church bulletin murdered to protect the white woman who wouldn’t talk to him. By our boys, the heroes.
Anything can be justified. Anything.
—-
From Catcher in the Rye and 9 Stories I move on to Lorraine Hasberry’s Raisin in the Sun and then John Okada’s No No Boy. Then Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony which will be followed by Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima. These texts all talk with each other. With us. The non-white people struggling with the power that white people have to use whenever and where ever they see fit. And with the country that justifies the violence.
The Questions wrap around all these texts (Who are we? Who do we want to be?), but they take a different meaning to them when brown and black people ask them. Who are we to kill others for a nation that would kill us the minute we get home? Do we want to kill people that look just like us, for a nation that would kill us just as easily? Is this the sort of world we want to live in?
Is this the sort of world we want for our children?
What do we do now that we know the answer is no?
—-
He walked along, thinking, searching, thinking and probing, and, in the darkness of the alley of the community that was a tiny bit of America, he chased that faint and elusive insinuation of promise as it continued to take shape in mind and in heart. ~No-No Boy
The answer is no. Over and over again, no. Everybody from the suburban housewives to the the teenagers to the churches. No. But you cant hear the ‘no’ if you don’t know what they are saying ‘no’ to.
Yes, this war may be justified, but no–a thousand times NO–this is NOT the world we want. This is NOT who we want to be. Almost universally, No. From deep in the icy suburbs to the stifling hot urban ghettos. From churches in 1950s Detroit to Black Lives Matter protests in 2015. No.
Of course many of us are still wrapped up in the question of ‘justification.’ Corporations, the military and the government have formed an unholy Trinity to keep our eyes off the prize, to keep us masturbating to the ‘same corpse‘ over and over again. Many of us have learned the Trinity’s lesson uncommonly well–for some of us, we have the resources to deal with the trauma, heart break, and betrayal much more efficiently than others do. So we got used to focusing on ‘was it justified.’ We felt safe, we felt normal and comfortable. And eventually we stopped noticing what happened if you said no. And we started asking why anybody would say no. And then blamed the people who said no when the punishments reigned down.
But there are more and more of us noticing that we have to be kept busy with the question of justification so we don’t notice the more important questions. The Questions. Sure this war, this bombing, this violence may be totally justified. But do we want to be the sort of people that respond with war, bombing, violence? Anything can be justified. Do we want to be the sort of people that can justify anything?
What sort of world do we want to live in? Do we want to live in this world where any type of violence you can possibly imagine is justified?
It’s not an accident, not really, that the children of The Greatest Generation were the hippies, the marchers, the feminists, the brick throwers. And it’s also not an accident that we’ve done everything we can to fracture the resistance of those children from the trauma, broken hearts and sense of betrayal of their parents. And that we’ve done everything we can to fracture that trauma, those broken hearts and sense of betrayal of the parents from WW2. From the ‘no’ of The Greatest Generation. We have to believe that the children were revolting against the conservative parents instead of advocating for them. So that the wars can go on.
But who did those children of the The Greatest Generation give birth to? Who is Generation X? Who are the Millennials? And what are our questions? Are we brave enough to put down the mirror and look at each other? Are we courageous enough to take up the flag of questions our parents and grandparents asked? To stop caring if it’s justified, and instead focus on building the world we want to live in?
Are we courageous enough to look at who are we? And imagine who we want to be?
Somewhere hidden in the haze of tear gas and the shrill of ceaseless police sirens, you can feel the questions forming…How do we become who want to be? How do we build a world we want to live in?
—-
This is a nation that tells it’s history through the justification of war. What isn’t a means to that end, doesn’t get told or remembered. Pay attention to the pictures above–each picture has a name. Except the last one. The one that features a nameless faceless black man. His body taut, his arm angled to throw back an act of violence perpetrated against his community, his hair reaching back towards his arm, as if to help it get rid of the violence. His shirt, the flag. The US, defined. And yet, this photo has no name, not like the others.
What isn’t a means to war, doesn’t get named. So it won’t be remembered.
We must go back and stitch the web of time back together again on our own. (Re)learn what we thought we remembered. Find out what is missing where we never knew there was an empty space. Remember the questions of the living. Answer them. And then ask our own.
“We are citizens of a country that we still have to create—a just country, a compassionate country, a forgiving country, a multiracial, multi-religious country, a joyful country that cares about its children and about its elders, that cares about itself and about the world, that cares about what the earth needs as well as what individual people need. I am, you are, a citizen of a country that does not yet exist, and that badly needs to exist.” ~ Dr. Vincent Harding
It’s been 70 years since the Japanese officially surrendered, starting the process of ending WW2 hostilities. There is an alternative to the way we live now. The world can be changed, and everybody, even the military, knows this, even if only intuitively. It’s why they spend so much time trying to convince us otherwise. That we have no choice. That we must carry on–because we are justified.
But now we know the truth. The world can be changed. We can build what does not yet exist. Who are we? What kind of world do we want? How do we build the sort of world we want to live in?
We are alive. And we remember the living who gave us so much.
Sunrise,
accept this offering,
Sunrise.
i was (re) born in Flint….
I wandered so aimless life,
then praise the lord, i saw the light.
now i’m so happy…
only, being (re) born in flint, it didn’t make me happy. it didn’t fix things for me. in many ways, it made things worse. i’ve spent most of my life since flint trying to recover from that birth.
birth is wonder and joy and tears and love–but birth is also ripping, bleeding, tearing. agony.
where do i say i’m from? when the place that birthed me almost killed me?
~~~
it’s my day one day off in three months and i’m sitting on an icy cold bench in the middle of a small wooded area in the back of a library. anytime i’m not working, i’m usually sleeping. but today, i need to be outside. i need to hear trees instead of frying meat, i need to smell dirt instead of grease. i need to remember that i’m only 18.
my journal sits unopened in my lap. in a different world at a different time i had wanted to be a writer. i breathe icy air deep into my lungs. try to undo the twisty knot in my stomach.
the cold of the bench against my legs makes them ache. but i don’t get up. i have no place to be, nobody to be there for. the only people who would notice my absence if i died in these woods would be the people at work.
and they’d be looking for me to tell me i was fired.
~~~
i’ve been watching old bob probert and joey kocur hockey fights from the 80s. i spent my youth wanting to be joey kocur. boy, he could beat the shit out of a person. there was nothing I loved watching more than joey kocur slam his gloves off and grab a hold of someone’s shirt. fighters were beautiful in how they moved. they were beautiful in their masculinity. because those big guys had a fighting code, and ethic. they didn’t take on little guys. and they didn’t fight just because. they fought to protect. to take care of. to make sure nobody messed with the team captain or the high scorer. they gave other players the room to be brilliant.
watching those hockey fights in the 80s was how i learned working class love is shown less in words and more in how willing somebody was to put their body in the way of a train for you. how willing they were to fuck somebody up who tried to hurt you. ‘i got your back’ wasn’t just something you said.
but watching these fights now…mostly just make me sad. especially watching bob probert. kocur had (and still has) his problems with alcohol and drugs, sure–but probert. the intensity of his some of his fights went well beyond a loyal teammate defending his captain, and stepped into the coked up rage territory. where the calculated tactics of hockey fighting (grabbing the jersey, pulling the pads over the head, etc) were forgotten, and the other player became the stand in for every hurt probert ever had. his fighting leaked off the ice–there were bar fights and domestic violence arrests. there was therapy and sincere apologies to the press, but it never stopped. the rage so there could be no pain.
and eventually, probert fought kocur. they were good friends. good friends who usually avoided each other on the ice. because each of their jobs was to enforce. to fight. to be the one who loved so much, he’d use his body to protect. they were protecting each other by avoiding each other.
but the time came when they couldn’t avoid. kocur may have been smiling at the end of the fight, but probert–he meant for that fight to happen. he was angry. he wanted to hurt kocur. it was only because kocur was as good a fighter as probert that he handled probert, wouldn’t let himself become an object to be punished by probert.
that fight was the first time i saw the truth about loyalty and masculinity and working class love. sometimes masculinity was ugly. sometimes it was a burden so great the only reason friends survived it was because they were as big as you. sometimes loyalty was a job. and a job always trumped friendship. even for fighters. there’s a reason why hockey was so firmly embraced by working class detroit for so long. all of us workers could see and understand what Bob Probert and Joey Kocur were doing when they got in fights…and we all knew what it meant when they got arrested (again) for drunk driving. because we were leaving work and doing the same thing.
trying to cope.
~~~
my kid’s been studying the Great Sit Down Strike of Flint for school. through the course of studying, she came across a woman named genora dollinger. i am a women’s studies major and I had never heard of dollinger. i am from flint, and I never heard of the sit down strike until after i left. but since i found out about dollinger, i’ve been reading/viewing everything i can, sharing what i can find with my kid, but mostly just absorbing what this woman said and did.
she was perhaps most well known for forming the womens emergency brigade during the strike. but she was truly admired by me for standing up to her white supremacist father. for dragging her kids to protests. for talking openly about getting an abortion. for continuing to organize even after being beaten almost to death. for using the time she spent in the hospital recovering from bouts of tuberculous to read up on socialist theory. for organizing even when she had to put paper into her shoes to cover up the holes in them. who can afford new shoes when you have two babies to feed and a protest to organize?
she wasn’t the most eloquent writer. she was blunt and practical, cut right to the chase. i also tend to think that genora probably took up way too much space and knew her own story too well. she’s done a lot of interviews, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between each of the interviews because she says almost the same thing in each of them.
but is it her fault that she was asked the same questions repeatedly?
is it her fault that the only value anybody ever found in a sick old woman from flint michigan was in the way she could fill the bellies of lecherous academics?
genora spent a lot of time when she was older fighting for the place of women in the collective memory of the sit down strike and union organizing. at a celebration of one of the anniversaries of the sit down strike, she used her time to speak to berate a male historian who was on the stage sitting next to her for how he had written about the women of the strike. when she was done, he threatened to take genora down. she told him to fuck off.
most people would see that as fearless. feminists would write that moment as bold, as inspirational. standing up for women. i suspect some of it really was because she was an inspirational bad ass who wasn’t afraid of shit. but i suspect more of it was because she knew better than most how a body could be eaten and spit out–replaced the next day, like it never existed.
and how badly to be forgotten hurts when the only thing you’re allowed to have is memories.
~~~
i’m laying on the hospital bed, an oxygen mask on my face, steroids pumping into my arm, an oxygen counter hooked up to my finger. my cook’s apron hangs on the chair next to the bed, my work boots ground dark stains on the sterile white sheets. i’ve had another asthma attack at work.
later on in life, i’ll be in therapy, and we’ll wonder if those asthma attacks i kept having were really panic attacks. but back then, when i was 18 and working 60-70 hour weeks so i wouldn’t be on the streets, i scared enough people that they called the ambulance.
and now i am laying on the hospital bed. i can smell grease mixed with oppressive body odor. i try not to imagine what the doctors and nurses who were working on me thought of when they smelled me. i hadn’t noticed the smell when i was at work. everybody smells just like you.
the nurse checks in on me, then points to the phone. says i can call somebody to come sit with me. leaves the room. i lay on the bed, breathing the oxygen, watching the numbers measuring how much oxygen is in me shift up and down, up and down.
89.
93.
80.
87.
i don’t move.
there’s no one to call.
~~~
the men and women of the flint sit down strike weren’t sitting down for money, per se. men were working so hard and so long, they’d come home and collapse on the floor, unable to even bring the fork of food their wives had cooked to their lips. black men working the worst jobs had skin burned off their backs from the heat of steel vats. fingers were lost to the ravenous machines. wrap up the stump, get back to work. there’s plenty of men who would love your job.
genora noticed things woman’s perspective. men were not good husbands. they beat their wives. came home drunk, trying to cope. with the burning ravenous machines. and doing it badly. women didn’t have enough money after the drinking to feed the kids. working women had to deal with predatory bosses. in one department, an entire shift of women had to be treated for the STD a boss had given them.
when the men sat down, it wasn’t for the money. it was for their lives. so they could be good husbands. so they wouldn’t hurt so badly they needed a drink just to make it to bed. so they could focus on their growing up kids.
when the women supported their husbands, their brothers, their fathers, their fellow workers, it wasn’t for the money. it was for their lives. so they could see their husbands smile. so they could work without fear. so they could finally see the future their children would live.
so they wouldn’t be spit out. forgotten.
the sit downers got a lot of things wrong. genora herself would tell you in a heartbeat what they got wrong, if you ever asked her a question that assumed she was critically aware. you never saw intense like when you asked genora about the bureaucracy that mandatory union fees created.
but something the sit downers got right was that they knew a union was about better pay so that workers could be more human. they knew the sit down was about better working conditions so that workers had time to remember they were human. they knew they couldn’t stop because if they did, they were agreeing to feed themselves to the voracious machines.
they looked at that desperate feeling of being forgotten straight in the face. just some drunk. just some white trash. commie trouble makers, wife beaters, lezzies, whores, tramps.
replaceable bodies, scarred knuckles…
and they said solidarity. forever.
it’s amazing how radical their decision was, even today.
do we have that same clarity?
that same understanding?
that we’re fighting for each other?
for us?
~~~
i’ve seen the documentary on genora dollinger and the women’s emergency brigade at least five times already–two times in a theater packed with community members. suddenly people want to remember genora and the women of flint. suddenly people find her useful. at one post-viewing panel i attended, we were supposed to talk about how important women were, about how nothing could’ve been accomplished in that strike if it weren’t for the women. and the three union men on the panel called me “little lady” and “girl” whenever i asked a question or made comments.
i didn’t have enough guts to ask them what they thought genora would think of them calling her that.
~~~
i was born in one city. and then i moved to another, and faced down what genora dollinger and all the sit downers did decades before me. nobody to call. nobody who cared. used parts.
i was being used. and forgotten. forgotten even as I stank up their sterile rooms, greased up their white cotton.
it was in that city that every bit of me finally died. completely collapsed under the pain of having no one to call. but it was also in that city that other people who knew the shame of smelling without knowing it invited me out for drinks. who shared their joint with me out by the dumpsters on smoke break. who didn’t ask why i never talked about my family. who had my back when the guy at the bar started a fight with me. who put their body in front of a running train. for me.
and so in flint, i was born.
~~~
i spent most of my life believing there was something good, something valuable, about me because i was a hard worker. because like a good mexican, i did the work nobody else wanted to. i picked the blueberries. i scrubbed the floors. i washed the dishes. i worked instead of studying. i worked for free. i worked so hard and so well, people couldn’t see what that work was doing to me. they didn’t see the shoulder pain that i still, 30 years later, am going to therapy for. they didn’t see the slices in my arms, memories from the ritual i performed at night, trying to feel something. anything. they didn’t care how small my dreams were. they didn’t ask if i was ok. they just kept repeating; oh, thank you SO much for doing this so i don’t have to!
and their gratefulness was enough for me.
gratefulness is a type of love. right?
flint didn’t just help me to see what all that work was doing to my body. it slapped me in the face with the truth. unless you fight, unless you love, unless you look at the person next to you, and see yourself in them–you will be forgotten. replaced. and forgotten. because there’s always somebody who will work if you won’t. used parts.
but even as flint slapped me, it tried to soften the blow. other broken people surrounded me. and showed me how to love in the war years.
~~~
i am walking in the woods. i have to keep a good pace, there is only an hour before i need to pick the kids up from school. but the wind is blowing so hard, i’m almost knocked over with each step i take. i should go back to the car and just listen to music or write–but i keep walking. the ground is slippery under my feet. it rained recently, and the leaves are slick with decay.
i had to leave flint. once i had kids, i could hardly tolerate the taste or smell of flint, much less the slap in the face. the thought of my babies getting that slap filled me with rage. other people, people with more money or whiter parents or better luck, their children weren’t being slapped. their children were so precious, so valuable, people quit jobs for them. to stay home and take care of them. nurture them with big dreams and lots of love. other people’s loyalty to their children was not a job. and their children have never been the used parts the machines spit out.
and so i decided that my children wouldn’t be used in their place. my children would be precious, and valuable to the world too, even if i had to kill the world to make it happen. so i packed them up and left. the city that birthed me.
things were not any easier in University Town. people could tell immediately that i didn’t belong. one child on my hip, the other child squirming in my belly as i answered the professor’s question. but i stayed. fought down their stares. because i knew what was meant for me, for my children, if i didn’t.
i still, even now, am far too aware of how close being forgotten circles around us all. around me. those are the especially hard days. sometimes, i can’t get out of bed. other times, i come out swinging, destroying anything and everything i can. the only reason loved ones survive is because they are as big as i am. and know how to fight back.
but the good days are starting to outnumber the bad ones. and on the good days, i think more and more about flint. about the sweat watered ground. the roaring freeways. connecting us all.
to each other.
to the day we said fuck it
we can change the whole thing…
for each other.
for us.
~~~
i have reached the area I was looking for. a large field of wild flowers and over grown grass. two long tracks are dug into the earth from years of trucks driving through the field. the wind is still blowing hard, but it’s not cold. i have a few minutes before i need to head back to the car.
after i pick up the kids, i’ll stop by W*’s work and pick him up too. maybe we’ll go out to dinner. spend the evening catching up with each other. or maybe we’ll pop in one of the harry potter movies and and talk through it like we always do. because we’ve seen the movies just that many times. or maybe the kids didn’t get enough sleep last night and are angry little bears now, and W* and i will fight all the way home. where i’ll go to the computer and he’ll go to the t.v.
i don’t know. it’s hard to predict what will happen in the future. but when you know how to love in the war years…there’s a little less about the future to worry about.
~~~
i breath in deeply. the rays from the winter sun glitter on the field in front of me like water. i raise my arms up to the sky, lean into the whipping wind. it holds me up, pushing into me, rushes through me. i close my eyes and feel the warmth of the sun burn into my face.
i am from flint.
and i am alive.
i exhale slowly, lower my arms. then i turn and start the walk back to the car.
~~I submitted this years ago to three different publications I think. Only one responded and then they never replied again after numerous attempts at contact. Ive not laid eyes on this since then. Rereading after so many years I can see why some might not take it–especially towards the end where I introduce the ‘man in orange.’ If I submitted this anywhere today, I’d take the ‘man in orange’ out or edit the hell out of him.
Walking to Liberation
There is a mythology of walking in the US. A mythology of moving. A mythology that says walking and moving are good. Something to engage in. Even admirable. The stories of Walden Pond, the Oregon Trail, and even Columbus liter our children’s education. An entire generation rested their identity on the movement into space, and the heroes of Manifest Destiny, better known as ‘walking for colonialism,’ Meriweather Lewis and William Clark, have taken their places on our coins and in our history books. My home state (and perpetual owner of the “fattest” population in the US title) of Michigan even rolled out the 10,000 steps program a few years back in an effort to contain the citizenry’s ever expanding belt size. If all us Michiganders just made an effort to take 10,000 steps every day, we’d all be fitter and healthier and happier.
Environmentalist’s answers to pollution and degradation often depend on movement in the outdoors–if we can’t stretch and move and find our humanity in clean air and quiet forests, where on earth will we ever find it? A long walk in the woods is where our souls are saved. John Muir sat in a tree just to see what it felt like to be a tree, for heaven’s sake. We need the outdoors so we can remember who we are.
But what happens when this mythology is proven to be exactly what it is? A mythology? A story? A lie even? A violent lie used to control and abuse a population of human beings whose bodies do not easily conform to or carry the labels of “citizen” or “hero” or even “fat person with a desire to be “healthy”? What happens when nature and walking and movement are used as a way to deny a person’s humanity rather than a way to figure it out? And what happens when it turns out the only way to “heal” from the violence of “walking” is walking?
—
I am walking down a long dusty trail. My feet are throbbing and my skin is sunburned. There are blueberries everywhere. So many left, even after all these weeks of picking. The setting sun sits warm and mellow on the top of the bushes and quiet Spanish sifts around the air as we all walk the mile back to the cars. There are younger and older children than me in the group. Even as we all are so tired it is hard to continue taking steps, a few of us still manage to push and poke at siblings or friends. One younger girl swings a bucket at an older brother. Parents scold and the brother laughs because not only is she getting yelled at, but she missed too. The day is almost over. We can hear crows in the distance. Soon, we’ll have a warm dinner and a soft bed.
It’s a nice time of the day.
—
In 2008, a fellow media justice activist and organizer, Jess Hoffmann, and I decided to begin a collaboration together. I had just come out of a really rough year of organizing and knew that any project I took up from that point on had to center on my health. Eventually, after much talking, we agreed we would each take walks in our own cities (Jess in Los Angeles, me in Ypsilanti, Michigan) and then post about what these walks brought up in us online. We would do it under the guiding principle of (re)thinking walking. Reconsidering what walking was, what it had become through the centuries, what it meant to each of us. We would put the project of walking itself under a lens.
Was walking really all it was cracked up to be? Was health as it was connected to walking? Was the popular goal of so many activists–to heal and be “healthy”–really what our goal should be? As organizers? as activists? What really were the politics of walking?
—
Watching the movie, Into the Wild. It’s dark and I’m alone. A rare and beautiful thing for me, mamí of two and life partner to one. The young white boy on the screen is naive. Beautifully so. Believes in people. Believes in women. Knows things can change. Knows nature has the answers. And yet, when he dies at the end, I don’t see beauty or feel horror or even sympathy. The beautiful white kid was stupid. He thought a few books could get him through Alaska. Could help him survive the reality of life.
I want to scream at the stupid boy; even Thoreau knew not to go running off into the woods by himself. He stayed within walking distance of town and was visited regularly at his cabin. He was experimenting with capitalism. Do you really need to buy what you are told to buy?
This kid, this stupid naive beautiful kid, was experimenting with aloneness. Do you really need a community in order to survive? Or can books suffice?
Only a wealthy white kid could possibly even think that these were questions that needed to be asked.
—
The first post I wrote was about Sacagawea, the native woman who was with Lewis and Meriweather on their explorations through the US. Walking that week had been a painful experience for me. Undiagnosed illness and normal working class stress on the body usually made it that way for me. I felt deep compassion for this woman, whose body probably hurt more often than it didn’t while she worked. Sacagawea almost died from pregnancy complications on the trip and suffered from a life long undiagnosed painful inflammation of her reproductive organs. Her pain was often so great it made it into the journals: “if She dies it will be the fault of her husband as I am now convinced.”
But as much compassion as I felt for her, I felt only frustration with myself. Why couldn’t I get up when I told my body to? Why was it getting so hard to force my body to do what I wanted it to do?
I began the (re)thinking walking series at a time when I was the most profoundly unhealthy I’d ever been in my life. And yet, I’d spent most of my life, since I was a small kid of nine or ten, moving. Physical labor. Picking blueberries, flipping burgers, waiting tables, delivering newspapers. This is the life of a working class Chicana and her family.
It was only after I moved into the still emotionally stressful but hardly physical world of academia that I figured out the everybody else didn’t start working at nine years old. That everybody else hadn’t been out in the fields or flipping burgers instead of hanging out with friends or studying for the next exam since they were kids.
And now, as an adult in academia, while others were out drinking and having a good time after classes, I was in my car, driving around for hours. Wondering. What on earth was I doing to myself? What had I been doing to myself? Who was I moving for? Who decided that I would be the one working for over a decade before these other people got their first job?
And why did taking a walk to “lose weight” stir up the same feelings of resentment that the realization that other people hadn’t been working their childhoods away did?
—
Soon, after putting an online invitation, another woman of color joined Jess and I on our ‘walk.’ She was a dancer and a woman with a disability–and she challenged us: why is there such an emphasis in so many of these walks on the pain? Does walking always hurt? Is it always painful? Is there never any beauty in moving differently? Is there nothing beautiful at all in difference? Or in learning to do things in a way that is different than what you expected?
—
At her questioning, I started to realize why it was often so hard for me to do much more than sit when I was supposed to be walking. Movement, or space (because I was finding they were both essentially the same thing,) is not our own. The right to not move is what makes moving important. And the right to not move is a right that many of us, especially those of us in the working class, rarely have.
Before I could ‘move’ in the name of health (and what was this ‘health’ thing anyway?), I needed to spend some time consciously and purposefully not moving. Reclaiming my body from the machine that had been feeding on it for so long, it was normal now. And by ‘not moving,’ I didn’t mean, “passed out on the couch after a 15 hour work day.” But rather instead, intentionally acknowledging what it feels like to not move at all. Paying attention to the stiffness that seeps into muscles and hips after long periods of no movement. Watching the world move when my presence was not a part of it. Imagining different ways to move. Wondering why the thought of beauty connected to my own movement was such an impossible thing to imagine.
—
He sits at the stretch of land between “claimed” and “wild” every Saturday morning with his gun and a mug of coffee. He wears his orange hunting coat and his steel-toed work boots. He has sun glasses that he never wears clipped to his coat pocket and sips his coffee with his gun cradled in the crook of his arm. He meets his fellow Patriots at the local gas station before they drive together to the outpost constructed to help with the “hunt.”
This man hunts “illegals.” Or, as I know them, my friends. My neighbors. My loved ones. He hunts them because his government has such a poor immigration policy and the US/Mexico border is like a sieve. And he needs the companionship his fellow Patriots offer and the desert is beautiful in the early morning hours.
—
As I’ve learned to be comfortable with different types of walking, I’ve come to realize how much of my moving depends on me facing down that man in orange. My existence as a US citizen is defined by the space neither of us have ever really been allowed to access, not really. My existence as a human being with the right to move in ways that I need to with joy and glory are defined by that space–just as his is.
I have never met the man in orange. I’ve never actually even seen him. But the people of my community are terrified of him. They know he doesn’t bother calling the police when he sees them, his finger goes straight for the cold curve of the trigger on his gun. Women take birth control for months before they cross over because they know this man rapes and there is nothing they can do to stop it. Men contemplate, will they fight or run when this man and his buddies see the group of Mexicans resting from the desert heat?
I feel sorry for this man in many ways. He is broken. Maybe in a different way than I am or the people of my community are–but broken nonetheless. And I know what that feels like, to feel incomplete. To ache for something more but not be sure what that elusive “more” really is. And he knows what I know. The secret: movement is what builds. New worlds, new communities, new life. Movement is where life is. Walking is what gives birth to movement.
But we sit on opposite sides of the desert and glare at each other because we both know the truth. Mythology makes us believe that our walking in the US is an act of freedom. An act of defiance and individualism. A heroic act. But in reality, walking, moving, taking up space, are all dangerous acts. Acts that can invoke such fear, they are carefully controlled by the nation/state. If movement is what brings life, movement must be controlled at the deepest most individual level. It must be something done to “lose weight,” or “find yourself,” or even “to ‘settle’ new lands.”
I am a US citizen, as are both of my parents. And yet, what does that mean, really? There is no other way to describe my father other than immigrant. While born in the US, he moved back and forth between the US/Mexico border in a way that is common and familiar to most people in my community. He knows two communities well enough to call both of them home. He is one of the people who has managed to cross that stretch of fiercely contested land and come out alive. He knows what sweat on the body smells like in the middle of desert heat.
It is a smell neither I nor the man in orange understand or have ever experienced. And yet, it is something that both he and I obsess over. It is a strong smell, pungent and wet, filled with knowledge. Knowledge about what happens in that space between two communities.
Survival.
In spite of it all.
—
Control is intimately connected to movement. And because the outdoors–nature–is where control of movement happens, an environment based liberatory praxis can only begin to be built by looking towards and making leaders out of those whose control of public space in the US is the least secure: border crossers, homeless people, day contractors, sex workers, those with non-gender conforming bodies, disabled people, young people and even the fat people that are bullied and guilt tripped out of ever going outside ever. The people whose relationship to the land is not built on mythology or “finding oneself,” but on practicality and necessity. On human survival. Because what else is land there for? What other thing in the world could possibly be more urgent than survival?
—
I haven’t lost one pound since I began walking. Not one. And I don’t really think I found myself, not yet at least. But I do know that the existence of a poor fat brown girl is necessary.
And her movement–revolutionary.
the sound of water is everywhere.
it starts in my abdomen, the soft whir of incoming waves building until it crashes into my ears.
my hands go to my body and I try to pay attention, try to see the sun from under the waves,
but my body relaxes
and i sink…
***
i went to california recently. and saw the pacific ocean for the first time in my life. as i hiked toward it on that first day in california, i kept hearing a sound–like traffic. like the roar of the freeways that you can’t escape in southeast michigan. semi-trucks crashing across lanes, car tires slapping concrete, the relentless sound digs into your ears, even when you’re inside.
anger shifts into rage as i walk closer to the ocean. i am staying at a former army barracks converted into a national park and just this once, i need to see nature, feel nature, hear nature, without the taint of roaring freeways in the background.
but then i break through the forest i am hiking through and see for it for first time. the huge endless ocean. that’s when i realize that the roar was not coming from the freeways–but from the ocean.
thick rolls of sound crashing into rocks.
on that day…slow. a comfortable rhythm.
my feet easily shift from angry freeway rumble to the relaxed roll of the water.
i don’t stop walking until i am on a large cliff overlooking the entire ocean. i see nothing but water. no land, no people walking on the beach, no military barracks. just me and the ocean.
the sound is everywhere
and i sink…
***
it’s been years since i was suicidal.
but in michigan, things haven’t been going well. i was driving to work the other day, on that freeway that i have a relationship with. i see death almost everyday on this freeway, in the form of animals mostly, but every once in a while, people too. usually you know something horrible happened not because you see it, but because the freeway is backed up for hours. that usually means that whatever accident happened is deemed too grisly for the average person’s eyes and they shut down the freeway entirely until it’s cleaned.
sometimes, though, you see it. maybe the cops/ambulances aren’t on the scene yet. maybe it isn’t quite bad enough to shut everything down. traffic creeps along slowly enough that you can see the traumatized people’s faces as they stand next to obliterated cars, only aware enough to be grateful that they are not the person in the ambulance. you spend the rest of the slow ride into work thinking about things. thinking about life.
i try not to think about my time on the freeway much anymore. i try to respond to fear with sensible responses. leave two hours early so you can go slow. travel in the middle lane so you don’t have to deal with merging cars on the right or out of control trucks on the left. kitty litter in the trunk in case you get stuck. phone charged.
go slow.
one day, as i was driving down the middle lane, i’m in control, i’m in control, i’m in control…
a car coming in the opposite direction flew into the median, flipped completely around from the impact of landing, rolled up the small hill of the median and crashed into the wire fencing on my side of the road. it all moved in slow motion, i could see exactly what was going to happen even as it was happening. it was as the other car crashed into the wire fencing that i was just starting to see that there was no way i could escape the collision, even by going slower.
if it wasn’t for the fence, i would’ve collided head first with the other car. but the fence was there. the fence was there.
once i realized i had escaped, i didn’t pull over, i didn’t call 911 to report the accident. i kept going my “safe’ pace down the middle lane of the freeway. breathing. in. out. in. out.
in.
out.
i am in control
of nothing.
***
it’s been years since i was suicidal. and yet,
as i sink, the water fills me, suffocates me,
i don’t fight.
***
i’m going to be 40 this year. it’s a momentous year, one that can point to my achievements, allow me to take inventory, and make the commitment to live the next 40 years as i haven’t lived the past 40 years, with intentionality.
but my boss started the year off with that talk. the “there is never any easy way to say this….this organization needs to make some changes….” talk. i knew it was coming. i had known for awhile. in a way that somebody always expects things to go wrong knows. i got the email from my boss on a friday, asking if we could meet the upcoming tuesday. i replied sure, and asked “why?” i never got a response.
so i knew. i knew what was going to happen before it happened. i almost hyperventilated as i waited for my turn to get fired (there were three other people fired on that day). i tried to text mr. toast for support–but my fingers were shaking too much. after almost dropping my phone, i gave up. took a deep breath. and walked into a room to face down a table full of board members and bosses.
“there is never any easy way to say this….”
can you be chicana and not have a job? a chicana getting a job is testament to the world that you are no longer a child, no matter how young you are. if you could bring home a paycheck, if you could help provide, you were grown. i’ve had a job since i was 11 years old.
what am i if i don’t have a job? what am i if i was fucking FIRED from my job? who am i allowed to be?
who am i?
***
i suffered for years from severe gallbladder issues. horrible attacks that completely immobilized me, drained me so much that i couldn’t get out of bed for days. after years of suffering, my body suddenly revolted and things got even worse. for three months i threw up everything i ate, had severe attacks constantly, and was mostly unable to get out of bed, even to work.
i finally convinced a doctor to take the damn thing out. i never felt more right about a decision–and yet, as the day drew closer and closer, i felt more and more backed into a corner. i’d be in bed, trying to doze, doing my best to quite my body, only to be awakened by dreams of people choking me, using my blankets to smother me. one day, the dreams were so bad, i finally forced myself out of bed and wandered around the house aimlessly, looking for something, anything, to distract me.
i found mr. toast working out in the garden.
he said hey as i walked to him and kept working.
i stood in front of him and made him stop.
suddenly, everything came hurling out. i just need to tell you in case i die from this surgery that i love you that i really love you and that i’ve loved you all these years even though i never really thought i did but i do and i need you to know that, to really KNOW that in case i die. i love you. i mean, i really really love you. i’ve never loved anybody else. just you.
he stood there for a minute and then smiled. i know you love me.
but i stopped him. no, i mean i REALLY love you. i’m not just saying it.
he paused. amused. so you mean you’ve just been saying it all these years?
yes, that’s what i mean. but i didn’t realize that i wasn’t actually just saying it, that i actually MEANT it. i really do love you. and i need you to know this. in case i die.
he laughed. and pulled me into his chest. his warm sweaty chest, that has held our crying babies for hours at a time, that i can perfectly snuggle my body into when he hugs me, my head resting in the curve of his neck, my body wrapped completely by his arms.
i know you’ve always loved me, bfp.
i needed you to know. in case i die.
he is kissing my face, my hair, my lips. you’re not going to die. and i love you too. i’ve always loved you.
the sky is blue. the warm air twists around us, holding us together.
i love you.
there is nothing like potential death to make a person brave.
***
the water floods my chest, i can’t breath.
i don’t fight it.
***
i don’t want to die. i’ve never wanted to die. even when i was suicidal.
but what is the alternative? it is near impossible to live life without love, without having been loved. i read this book by dr. gabor mate where he gave a case description of a man who doctors found had a serious illness. life threatening, but the guy definitely had a good chance. the guy, however, didn’t have a strong support team, didn’t feel like he was worth fighting for. so even after church members talked to him and his doctors talked to him and everybody talked to him and told him he had a really good chance of survival–the guy just shook his head. refused to fight, and eventually died. mate was using this story to talk about support systems and how having them can really help improve your chances of getting through a serious illness.
i took it as a testimonio. one that i could’ve written. what is the use of fighting, when there’s nothing to fight for?
i was that guy, and i didn’t even know it. a tale of two city’s unloved sydney carton. the lonely drunkard who was smart enough (hurt enough?) to know that it just didn’t make sense that the pure innocent lucie could love him. it didn’t make sense that anybody could love him. so he switches himself with a man about to be killed by a mob. sydney will be killed in his stead. the man sydney saves is the man who could be loved. the man who was dearly loved. who was not taking up space.
sydney does not send himself off to die from a sense of martyrdom (i will die so others can live!), but because there’s no reason to live. how could you be arrogant enough to take up space when you could never possibly be loved?
as a small child, i’d play make-believe and i was a beautiful and kind hearted girl who could see the good in sydney. so i loved him. and i’d plead with him to live, to please please live. eventually he’d be energized by my love, and i’d help him escape and we’d live happily ever after.
at some point, as i got older, i couldn’t manage to convince sydney that i loved him, even in my imagination. he’d look up at me sadly, shake his head, and turn away. eventually, i just stopped playing make believe. even my imagination couldn’t overcome reality.
***
water is flooding into my mouth, filling my chest. i can only see watery darkness.
i am safe.
***
i don’t want to die. i never wanted to die, even when i was suicidal.
and that’s why when i read that case study in that book that i can’t even remember the title of, i did not look away from the mirror. i studied what i saw for hours. shocked, not at the willingness to die, but at the comfort. the utter ease of drowning. the way i moved in it, as if with an old friend. no need to talk, no need to explain. understanding each other.
all these years, i thought the ease of my relationship with death came from a buddhist sense of resignation: death is inevitable. or maybe it was acceptance of my depression. depressed people are ok with dying. depressed people don’t want to die, but they can’t help themselves. they just have to one day, when it becomes too much.
as it turns out, i did not really have a relationship with death at all. lack of value was who i had formed the real relationship with. it made sense that nobody would want me in this world, that i wouldn’t want myself in this world. i stopped noticing how much sense it made, and it just became the norm. hegemony played out in my own body. complete and utter submission to “valueless.”
valueless wrapped itself around me, comforted me when things got hard. it makes sense that i messed that all up, i’m a fucked up worthless piece of shit, right? it makes sense that i don’t get recognition for work done, other people who work harder/are better than me deserve it more. who am i? and why should it matter that i get nothing? why *should* i get something?
i looked long and hard at all those thoughts. and i started to realize something. so much of my writing up until that point had actually verbalized all those thoughts and tried to reconcile, conquer, own, destroy, evaporate, make friends with, and control those thoughts– practically everything i had ever written in the past 10 years, if i was honest with myself.
and the more and more i thought about it, even when i moved outside of my blogging and into my school essays or my short stories or the letters i used to handwrite as a child–it was all the same thing. the invisible relationship that i thought i had never really noticed was actually a life long battle that i have been trying to detangle myself from since i was a small child.
somewhere in me, there was somebody who was actually fighting. somebody who kept pushing. somebody who was inside the prison, not sitting next to me, but sitting IN me. somebody who wouldn’t let go. somebody who, even in the worst of times, kept whispering–
but…but…where did you get the idea that worthless people don’t deserve life?
but…why does screwing that one thing up mean you’re worthless?
but…who decided you were worthless anyway?
but…why do you have to believe it?
somewhere in me (buddhists tell me it is my true self, the inner buddha that is in all of us), there was somebody who always knew better. and fought back through writing. i didn’t really understand that there was a fight going on. i couldn’t see it. maybe it was that i didn’t want to. because then i would have to take sides.
i never wanted to die, even when i was suicidal.
what i never knew was that i was actually suicidal because i never wanted to die.
and i thought that was the only choice i had.
reading the story of the man who thought his only choice was to die, because he was alone, worthless, valueless, i saw clearly that he was wrong. i saw this, because for the first time, somebody who had no vested interest in my own battle pointed it out. i believed dr. mate, because he never claimed to love what i knew to be unloveable. that’s the cruel irony of it all. those of us fighting this life long battle with “valueless”? we would never in a million years think anybody else didn’t have the right to live. we would never talk to anybody else the way we talk to ourselves. we would adamently stand up for the person being assaulted by the words and judgement that we inflict on ourselves. i have gotten into physical fights with men who treat women the way that i treated myself. i would destroy any human being who talked to my children the way i talked to myself.
so it makes sense that the time i finally paused, stopped, sat down and studied the mirror up in my face was the time when a person was pointing out my own actions in somebody else. when the person who was pointing out my own actions never claimed to love what i knew to be unloveable.
i still think about the man from dr. mate’s book. i am very defensive of him. i don’t want anybody to think that he was “stupid” for just “letting” himself die. that this about needing to “get a more positive attitude.” or “if you just believe in yourself.” or “if you would get out of the house more.” or any of the crap people who don’t know what is going on try to “help” with. i don’t know if what he (i) have is depression. i could make a strong case that it’s actually a bad case of oppression. but whatever it is, whatever this battle is about, “being more positive” or “believing in yourself” is not going to win it.
but because of him, i am not hopeless. something will win this battle, because now i know what is going on. for the first time, i believe this truth more than i believe the logic of “valueless.”
something will win this war.
and i will be there to see it done.
***
my dreams are shifting. i no longer want to be fearless or even brave. because now i know that they aren’t really the point. i want what others know, without question. without even noticing it. hegemony taking over their bodies. they are loved. of *course* they are loved. it is natural and makes SENSE that somebody loves them. hegemonic love. it’s ok to try new things and go new places and not be perfect and face down life with or without fear–because you are loved.
it’s ok to be happy, it’s ok to put your fists down, it’s ok to lay next to your life long loving partner who has been with you through all the war years, and not worry that he’s just faking it or there because of some mistake.
it’s ok to just relax. rest your hand on his alive beating heart, breath deep.
maybe it’s even ok to start itching back around that idea that formed so many years ago, that faulty logic. maybe it’s possible to love somebody like me. maybe loving somebody like me isn’t such an impossible concept. maybe…maybe.
“maybe” holds all the possibilities i have never imagined before.
***
in california, i read some of my writing out loud for the first time. i spent the whole time in california feeling awkward and alone and too afraid to say much of anything to anybody. i was still struggling with my health issues and i felt ill most of the time. so old and out of place among a group of young brilliant activists. it’s hard to be an introvert surrounded by extroverts–it’s near impossible to deal with social anxiety around people who all want to do “get to know you” activities into the middle of the night.
but on one night–the night where they did “open mic,” i decided to read something i had written. something about dancing.
that night after my kids got home, we started watching the opera Carmen. It’s a catchy opera that is a lot more accessible than other operas are, but even so, they both went upstairs after a while. I was ok with that, because as soon as they went upstairs, i got up—and at first just paced around for a while—but eventually, that evil little monkey thief took over. and i started to dance. i swirled and twirled and practiced holding my arms just so while looking in the mirror. i thought i was being quiet—but in that way that kids always do, within about 6 minutes they were back downstairs asking incessantly, what are you doing, what was that noise, why are you doing that, what is going on, i thought i heard something, what are you doing?
i stopped at first, and started to tell them to mind their own business—but then my body took over. that body that is the universe. that universe that i am learning to trust. and next thing you know, i was dancing.
when i was done, people stood and cheered for me. women surrounded me and hugged me. there were tears and love and laughter. it wasn’t that i was exceptionally moving, a writer above all others. it was that kind people knew i didn’t like being the center of attention and were genuinely rooting for me. it was that in that place, for once in my life, i decided i didn’t need to have both fists up worrying about what could happen. i didn’t need to worry about if i was taking up space i didn’t deserve to be in.
i deserve to be here.
my fists go down.
and i am alive.
***
i am standing at the top of a small cliff at the end of the world. the silvery grey ocean flutters in front of me, the sun dips into the water. the waves roll into me, roll into my abdomen, my ears, my cells. i spread my arms and allow myself to fall from the hill into the water, into the sun.
the universe i am learning to trust.
this body that is the universe.
my face breaks through the water,
i say hello
to the seagull that floats
next to me.
***
i am back from california and i am in his arms. i breathe in the smell of his chest, savor the heat radiating from his alive body. i am on top of him and waves are crashing. i have never seen him before this moment, never noticed so much about him. the way his face softens with (could it be?) love when he watches me, the way his calloused worker hands that have changed diapers and cleaned up my vomit hold me, won’t let me go. the rhythm rocks in my ears, flows through my body. i have never seen him before. in all these years, i never knew that he loved me. i never knew.
he is in me and through me and he knows how comfortable it feels to me to drown. but he pulls me up anyway. rubs the muscles in my chest, opens my lungs. so i can breath.
there are warm blue kisses and our breath in the sun and mr. toast whispering.
you’re not going to die. and i love you too.
i breathe.
when i was a child, a group of adults made me show them the hair on my back and how far my arms hung down my legs. they marveled at the dark hair that swirled across my neck and back, took eye measurements of my hands to leg ratio. then after discussing it amongst themselves, they informed me that my hairiness and long arms indicated my close relationship to the apes. i was different, unusual, apelike, because i had two parents of different races. and when two people of different races fuck, they make little animal babies that are a sin against god.
on a different occasion, an adult informed me that i couldn’t be a dancer because i was fat, which was bad enough. but also because dancers have lovely long necks—swan necks. swan necks highlight a dancer’s gracefulness and beauty and make others feel happy when they look at them. this adult then looked at me and with those measuring analytical eyes, said, you don’t have that.
i don’t have that. i don’t have the long swan neck that makes others feel happy just to look at—i have a fat hairy ape neck. i have the neck that proves why race mixing is bad.
that i am a sin against god doesn’t bother me much, as god and i have never really been all that close anyway. but that i can’t dance? that nearly destroys me. i’ve always danced anyway. i’ve always cranked up music and after carefully composing my own choreography, twisted and turned and swung my way to a standing ovation from an audience of adoring fans. but always in basements. always behind closed and locked doors. even my dear partner, Mr. Toast, has only seen me dance my imagination dance once or twice—and just quick glimpses. i know i don’t have a right to be dancing. i am a thief, not a dancer. a thief stealing a few moments from the swan necked goddesses who dancing belongs to.
i’ve always known the link between emotions and body. but as i’ve gotten older, i’ve learned that it’s not just “emotions” and “body”—it’s far more specific than that. it’s repressed violence and illness. your liver and gallbladder are intimately linked in much of non-western medicine; when you don’t have boundaries or can’t protect the ones you do have, the gallbladder falls apart, and the liver gets angry. when you can’t tell adults to leave you alone, when you cant see any other choice but to believe you are an ape-like sin against god, your body becomes the only way you can say no. the only way you can be angry, and then say no.
unfortunately, nobody but you can hear your body saying no. and when it is so normal to hear ‘no’ you stop listening after awhile. and then you find yourself like i was. twisted up from the constant spasm of my gallbladder and poisoned by my broken liver. unable to get out of bed most days, never dancing, not even in private.
the ape-child was trained as well as the swan necked dancer. stop stealing what was never yours. and shut up about it. even if it hurts. shut up.
eventually the pain gets so bad, i begin to understand that the deal i’ve made is not just to ‘be quiet.’ but to not exist. i read those words, ‘we were never meant to survive,’ and it puts the deal i’ve made out on the table, out in the open for the first time. i poke and prod at the deal, wonder if what it threatens could possibly be true. i feel the oozing burn in my stomach, the twisting claw around my liver. i remember that i suffered thru the agony of yet another gallbladder attack, silent, on the couch, so sleeping family aren’t bothered. and i realize the threats are actually true. threats no more.
and i just can’t accept that deal. i reject it. not forcefully, or even happily. at least not at first.
but i do start working with my body, working to unlock it. i go to healing sessions (acupuncture, reiki, limpias, never ‘The Doctor’), and i can feel my body working to push my brain to the side. my brain, the tyrannical prison guard that took over for those adults, kept me in line even better than they did. as my body frees itself from the death grip control of my brain, my body begins to recalibrate. in little ways at first.
a little way: mr. toast tries to talk to me while i’m working, i usually stop everything and listen. today i snap at him without even thinking—i’m WORKING. do I bother YOU at work?
a little way: the kids demanding food food food WE’RE SO HUNGRY! but i am sick. usually i get up to make them something anyway. this time i tell them there is cereal and milk or bread for sandwiches. make something.
the guilt creeps in—and my body revolts. but this time, not against itself. the kids make their own food, then ask me if i want something. mr. toast asks if i am busy the next time he sees me at my work table. it’s ok to say no. i relax. take a nap. and keep adjusting.
in big ways: I listen to a live broadcast episode of This American Life—it features a story of a man who, because of different operations to deal with his cancer, has lost the use of one of his arms. he talks of being gay and getting old and having cancer and being a person who used to dance. how much he loved dancing. how much he misses it, even though he was never any good at it. even though. he starts dancing on stage while ira glass softly describes his movements to listeners. he is old, gay and has an arm that doesn’t work. and he dances. so he is a dancer.
of course I cry. and am glad that nobody is home, because the tears quickly turn into The Ugly Cry. the stretched open mouth, the deep wrenching throat gasps, the snot leaking down the face like melting ice cream. The Ugly Cry for the little girl that just accepted without a fight that she was not human. The Ugly Cry for the grown woman with a tummy full of poison and no way to spit it out.
you reach a certain age, and you just know that there are some dreams that will never happen—you’ll never be a rocket scientist. you’ll never fuck somebody famous. you’ll never play the guitar in front of stadiums filled with screaming fans. you reach a certain age—and you just let those dreams go and it’s a bit sad—but it’s ok.
except i reached that age—and it wasn’t even that i decided to let go of the dream of dancing—it was that I never allowed myself to dream at all. i had let go of dreaming, erased it off my bucket list under the methodical eyes of adults that supposedly loved me. and then spent a lifetime apologizing for even daring to have “dream” on the list to begin with.
i cry so hard i almost throw up. out comes the poison, out comes the outrage, out comes the decades of no no no no…except i see the ‘nos’ now for what they are. the answer i was never allowed to have. and then the answer i learned to never give.
the dog walks over from his pillow, sits with his head on my lap. the cat moves to the back of the couch, so his body wraps around my head. i trust that the universe is letting me know it is ok to live life. that it is ok to live.
i decide that it is time to trust the universe.
that night after my kids get home, we watch the opera Carmen. It’s a catchy opera that is a lot more accessible than other operas are, but even so, it’s still an opera and both kids sneak upstairs after a while. I am ok with them leaving, because as soon as they leave, i stand up. first i just pace in front of the radio. but soon, the music wraps around me, lifts my arms, and i dance. i swirl and twirl and practice angling my fingers with delicate precision. i think i am being quiet—but kids have bat-like hearing, especially when they think their parents are enjoying themselves. almost immediately, they are downstairs doing that kid thing… what are you doing, what was that noise, why are you doing that, what is going on, i thought i heard something, can i do it too?
i stop at first, and start to tell them to mind their own business. but then my body takes over.
that body that is the universe.
that universe that i trust.
and then i am dancing. right in front of them. they’ve never seen me dance, except to slow dance with mr. toast. they are stunned for a minute, sharing astonished glances with each other. I turn up the opera and twirl a tight pirouette. then one kid laughs and dives under me. rolls around on the ground and finishes with a brilliant head toss, hair flying everywhere. the other child laughs and sort of tackles the first one, but elegantly. they both get up and kick their legs and hop around to the beat of the music. they are dancing. they are dancing because I am dancing. they are dancing with me.
i am a dancer who has changed the world.
i am a dancer.
