An Oakland Girl in the World
The end of a Sunday,
pink on the edges,
the moon a white wound.
Birds laughing
in some other language
as they fly off someplace
behind the roofs,
the wires and branches
that tangle like lives.
A crippled incest
crawls off to die
somewhere amid the vines
that wrap around the stairs
like green fingers
around the throat of this—
cars hissing
against a light
that is already gone.
What do untellable non-stories look like? Let me give you an example of such a non-story.
A mother is frozen in non-mourning for her dead family. She looks at her child with unshed tears and does not see her child.
“My mom had a girl,” Lynda told me. “She had four kids. Right, Steve?”
“I think so.”
“Three boys and one girl. Actually, I’m not sure; she never really talked about them. But I know she had a girl.
“Sometimes she would tell me how I looked like her, her other daughter. Except she’d had hair the color of corn. She’d always say that: ‘poat.’ Hair like ‘poat.'” She paused, repeated the word: poat, a strange sound from another life, one that hung in the air with its own kind of weight, gravity. “That is ‘corn,’ right Steve?”
Steve nodded, and Lynda looked down, off, some abstract place on the carpet: a thread that had gotten lost, fallen out, would never be noticed except in this one second.
This induces a sense of non-existence and depression in the child. The child wants to rescue, reassure, or enliven the parent and gain life for itself; it feels guilty and worthless when it fails. This is an example of how trauma can continue unwittingly across the generations.
Lynda smiled bravely and raised her eyes.
— Excerpt from “Transmission of Transgenerational Trauma“
So I, like a lot of people, have been nursing a major crush on Parisian street artist JR‘s work. It toes the lines between street art, activism and travel—or, more accurately, it searches out those lines and plasters photographs all over them. I got to check out his work in person back in September at FAME Festival (still one of my best travel experiences ever).
This week, a film about his Women Are Heroes project will be widely released, beginning in France and eventually making its way around the world. Here’s the English-language trailer:
So there might be glimmers of gimmick and paternalism. So it might be argued as “parachute-in” activism that does just as much to promote JR’s name as it does the situations and people he’s trying to highlight. That might be true, it might not. But I do get the distinct feeling that JR’s heart’s in the right place. You can’t deny that his work garners attention, makes people stop and think—and that it’s goddamn cool looking.
The Women Are Heroes project made me think about the Madres de Plazo de Mayo. When I was in Buenos Aires 5 years ago, the mothers were still meeting every Thursday to march, to demand an answer—an act of unforgetting. Because mothers don’t forget. I went to see them, and while I didn’t understand a lick of their Argentine Spanish, I could still feel it: that particular sorrow of a mother. You can’t argue with that; it’s something that we all know, that runs deep through the fabric of human existence, probably all existence (have you ever heard a wolf cry for its babies?). And I think JR touches on that.
So, I’m for sure gonna check out the film. I’m also super excited to see what he does next; I’m especially looking forward to his upcoming “Wrinkles of the City” project, which explores the memory of a city and its inhabitants. What’s more, I was stoked to see photos of his work in Phnom Penh, on the Women Are Heroes website.
Sometimes a harmonica sounds like a train,
a far-off train
as it passes
some lonesome landscape—
the sound of something leaving, an echo
through the window at night.
Which sounds like a heart breaking,
or the quiet wail
that escapes
when a heart breaks—
like steam through a valve
or a cry between lips
(“stay, stay”)—
when something leaves
and all you’ve got
to hold onto
is the sound of its going
and even that isn’t yours.
Even that leaves too.
Crisp blue and puffing chest, the glare of sunlight off the smooth flat of the Bay. My first run since a week-long flu, down along the Bay Trail, with its breezes and San Francisco views, pretty despite being directly beside a freeway.
I passed a little woodsy alcove. It’s mostly rocks and open space down there, but every now and then, beside a freeway exit, an overgrown patch of cluttered trees and shrubs is tucked alongside the trail.
I caught a glimpse between the leaves: a little stream, heavy from the rains; a long piece of wood placed over, a makeshift bridge; the dead remains of footsteps, the ghosts of footsteps, a path going in. Something was hiding in there.
I thought about the books I’d read as a kid—-Bridge To Terabithia—how kids in the country or in the suburbs, or in any event, not inside the city, would always have these places to hide. A creek or the woods, some undeveloped patch of something—a place they could escape to, along with their fantasies and maybe a stick to poke things with, to build empires in their minds where they were safe or powerful or in any event not in their own lives, some other place.
And I remembered how terribly jealous I’d be those kids—those kids in books, not real kids—because I lived in the city, and there weren’t any places like that. Or there were—under freeways, or the woods behind parks—but they were already filled up, claimed by junkies and derelicts with cardboard palaces, people retreated to their own fantasies, their own escapes, their own Not Heres.
There was a thin strip of dense trees behind the jungle gym at Children’s Playground, in Golden Gate Park. I’d wanted to go in there, to climb around, explore, find my own something magical. It was shady in there, I couldn’t see in, and I wanted to know what all mysteries lay in the damp earth and shadows.
“Don’t go in there,” my mother’d said.
“Why?”
“People live in there. There’s trash and needles and it smells.”
And I’d known, even then, that you could catch things with needles, things like death. I’d thought of sarcoma spots and sunken eyes, sick beds and the scatter of Chinese food containers, and I hadn’t wanted to go in there anymore, but I’d still wanted to go somewhere.
It was a good run. My shin splints didn’t hurt, although I did get a tightness in my chest, like a squeezing, that made me stop and walk for awhile. I stared into the open and soaked it in, and was ready to run again.
So… this is big news.
I’m among the ten writers and photographers that have been selected as a Spring 2011 Glimpse Correspondent.
I’m stoked because (as noted in the previous two posts), I keep wanting to cop out. Cause this is scary shit. And as I begin to contact NGOs and service agencies, a new fear is cropping up: I’m afraid of being The Do-Goodey White Lady. As in, what right do I have to write about this shit?
Two things have kept me going so far. One of them is the uncomfortable feeling of a story writhing around inside you, wanting to get out. The other is the absolute conviction that this is a story that needs to be told and, more importantly, needs to be heard.
And now a fuckton more people will be hearing it.
So, cool. Now I can’t cop out.
You haven’t heard from me in awhile. 11 days is the longest I’ve actually gone without posting since I started this blog, over a year ago. But it’s not cause I’m bored and not because I’ve given up, not because I’ve run out of things to say (I don’t think that’ll ever happen—sorry).
It’s because I’m filling up.
It’s like carbo-loading before a big race; it’s like tapering off your work-outs to store energy for the moment when it really counts, the thing you’ve been training and training for—sometimes, this time, without even knowing you’ve been training for it. The alignment of events is freaky, which only serves to confirm what my gut tells me is true: this is the trip I’ve been waiting to take.
I kept wanting to cop out. Which is how I knew it was for real, something I was truly scared of. “This is silly,” I’d catch myself saying. “You don’t need to write about all this; just go to SE Asia and bomb around and see the sights and don’t worry about writing this story you’ve been feeling swim around in your blood for the last ten years.” I found out my landlord won’t let me sublet, that my health insurance premium has gone up, and that I’ll literally be bankrupting myself by taking this trip. Why not just scrap the whole thing and curl up in the safety of the familiar?
But I’ve learned recently that what is familiar isn’t always safe. Take, for instance, the smell of alcohol and cigarettes on the desperate breath of a desperate boy: this is familiar. Take all the little ways I’ve learned to abandon myself, to not have to feel feelings, ways I’ve gathered like precious gems I won’t dare let go of: these are familiar. Take the black panic of a forgotten memory, the way it murmurs like voices behind a locked door; take running and running from this thing inside you that won’t sit still, not ever: this too is familiar.
Sometimes what is unfamiliar is actually safest. Or the thing that might save you, save that piece of you you’ve been trying to smother your whole life.
So a friend put over 700 songs on my ipod recently—really cool, diverse, obscure stuff. Some of the most interesting: Cambodian Cassette Archives. Considering how much art and music was destroyed during the Khmer Rouge, the fact some of these tracks survived at all is astounding. The synchronicity spooked me, especially considering that this friend didn’t know anything about my upcoming trip.
I was watching TV at my parents’ house, aimlessly flipping through channels. I stopped on some award show for humanitarian efforts, teary Hollywood stars giving medals and clapping solemnly. An NGO that works with disabled Cambodian youth was being highlighted.
I spent the other night wiggling down the rabbit hole of hyperlinks and Google searches, and found a couple NGOs that deal with the exact issues I’m hoping to explore in my travels—in short, the effects of trauma on the children of survivors, people who didn’t necessarily experience the initial trauma themselves.
Finding these organizations, obscure and underfunded, was like a kind of validation—that I’m not making all this shit up; that what I’ve observed over the course of my life isn’t anecdotal but part of a larger phenomenon, a star in a constellation, the part of the survival story that doesn’t get told: what happens when the physical horror ends, when you come to the US with a head full of nightmares and a pocketful of nothing, delivered into the heart of East Oakland or Long Beach or DC. That for a whole generation, this is where the story begins.
And goddamnit, it’s a story that deserves to be written.
So I’m reading my ass off. I’m writing individuals and organizations about interviews and site visits. I’m taking notes and making lists and drawing arrows, the connection between things I’d always suspected were connected, but couldn’t ever really prove. And I’m not blogging so much.
Do you ever get the feeling that you’re standing on the edge of something? Has there ever been shit you’ve kept black your whole life, but always kinda knew was still there, a type of gravity everything kept coming back to and coming back to?
Little memories have been popping up the last couple weeks, like sparks flashing—things I’d forgotten or hadn’t thought about in a really long time, except in passing. I reread my last post, and realized it was no accident that I compared Pol Pot to a dead uncle. Because I have my own dead uncle I don’t remember, don’t think about, except in passing.
So what happens when you dive into that black? When you unlock that door and let the murmurs have a voice?
I don’t know, but we’re gonna find out.
So I bought plane tickets to Southeast Asia. With a knot in my stomach.
It was the first time I didn’t get that rush, that tingle at the tangibility of travel plans—didn’t jump up and do a hop-skip happy dance across my bedroom floor. This is because, I realized, I’m scared shitless.
I figured as much, as I’d been balking on buying the tickets for no discernible reason. I couldn’t really tell you what it was. Yes, it’s gonna be one of the longer trips I’ve been on, just over three months, and it’ll be on a continent I’ve never been to, where my chances of muddling through the local language are next to nil. It’ll be humid as hell and the buses will suck and the roads will be shitty and the mosquitoes will buzz and I won’t be able to drink the water and I’ll have to negotiate the fabled squat toilet again and most likely I’ll get one of the gnarly stomach flus that turns me into a gasping, pale, dehydrated, crusty-lipped caricature of myself.
But I can tell you right away that that wasn’t all that made my stomach clench like a white-knuckled fist.
It’s gonna be a different kind of trip for me, more of a personal journey, a pilgrimage, in the Phil Cousineau sense of the term. It’s a trip I’ve wanted to do for a long time; ever since I started traveling, I knew I wanted to go to Cambodia. My childhood best friend’s parents had escaped and I’d always heard about it—this place and this person, Pol Pot—a presence I felt but didn’t understand. We didn’t learn about Cambodia in school, I didn’t hear about it on TV or in books, and Pol Pot became just another person around her house, like a dead uncle no one dared talk about, except in passing.
I couldn’t tell you exactly why I wanted to go, though, just that I felt this draw, this pull—the difference between a trip you want to take and a trip you need to take. The closest I could come was to say that I wanted to actually see this place I’d felt, to experience it for what it was—a place that, to me, was kind of like Jacob in Jacob’s Room: this big howling empty in the middle of the everything, that everything circled around but no one ever got close to, in to, inside of—like flies around a lightbulb.
“Can I write about it?” I asked Lynda. I was scared then too.
“My life is an open book,” she told me. “You can write about anything.”
“Can we get together and talk sometime, about what you remember?”
She sighed. “Yeah, of course, but to be honest, there’s so much I don’t remember. There’s a lot of blank spaces, you know.”
And it was like a little click. Blank spaces: the things we darken and blur and don’t let ourselves look at—that we push down, down, so far down, but still carry with us, the stories murmuring in our blood. Because I do that too, in my own way, in the way I think we all do—black out the things we can’t bear. But goddamnit if it isn’t all still in there, always; goddamnit if we don’t spend our lives circling around it, crashing our heads into the glowing glass of it.
I never cried when Lynda’s parents died, ten years ago. I realized this just after I’d bought my plane tickets. I was tired and irritated and, like a two year old, had decided to put myself down for a nap. But I didn’t really sleep, just laid there floating in the numb in-between space, a vagrant twitch here and there.
And I thought about the reality of going there, being there, a place that had become tragically mythic in my own mind, but also blurry, unreal—the face of that dead uncle you never met, but reconstructed, from photographs and passing stories, in your own mind. And it wasn’t like I’d finally be looking at that face, seeing it in real life, because it was gone and buried—but, I don’t know, like digging up the bones of what was left? No, that isn’t quite right either.
I had this dim notion that, to me, traveling to Cambodia was akin to traveling into some place inside myself, a blank place where there was nothing but a thick silence, a deathly silence; where everything was white, or maybe black, but in any case obscure; a place that looked empty, but really was full, pregnant with some sort of strange energy I didn’t understand but was somehow scared of.
That place wasn’t necessarily Cambodia, or really Cambodia at all, but a place inside myself. And I was fucking terrified of what I’d find.
I didn’t cry then, not exactly, but I teared up. Which is the closest I’ve come to letting myself really feel any of it—to looking at it and letting it become real.
December 9, 2003
“It’s a special kind of anesthetic. So we won’t be putting you completely under—you’ll still be lucid—but you won’t remember anything.”
Paper gown and stirrups, they injected the needle and you didn’t flinch.
You took it as a challenge: remembering.
You stared out of the window—out of the white walls made antiseptically cheerful, away from the faces and charts and the gleaming tray of tools—looked at a pond outside, gray water against gray sky, the geese sitting and splashing and silently honking—no noise, just their beaks moving in the shape of a scream.
The room went away, and the sides became black, tight, squeezing in, like the end of an old-timey cartoon—tunneling, until the whole world became that pond and those geese, trapped there in a December afternoon and a pinhole of consciousness.
And it’s like you weren’t there. You couldn’t see them working, couldn’t feel them working (working on you). You couldn’t hear them—or at least, you couldn’t remember hearing them, maybe a sound floated in here and there, but it didn’t stick to anything, memory like fly paper or that sticky tape the rats get stuck to and sometimes chew their own legs off trying to escape. So in that way, they were right.
You focused on the pond, out the window, struggled against the squeezing black. You fought for that pond, those geese (which now seemed like plastic geese) and you wondered if it was real or man-made—the pond, that is—whether the office park was built up around a marsh, filled in and cemented and paved clean, and the pond had been left there as a charming relic; or if it was added later, an empty lot dredged, a sliver of pastoral idyll amidst the row of generic 60s architecture.
It was man-made, you decided, because this was Alameda and everything was man-made, an entire island of fabrication: unearthly flat, because it wasn’t earth; flat like the Bay, because it was the Bay. Because the Bay moved under the flimsy layers of landfill, murmuring, like a waterbed.
And they’d always said that if a big enough earthquake hit, the whole goddamn island would sink—crack and crumble and get swallowed into the water, because there was nothing solid underneath, just landfill, which you’d always assumed meant trash, like a trash patty, a whole city built on garbage.
And you imagined a big enough earthquake making the water reach up, tear apart all the little everyday cracks—in sidewalks and in the walls of old buildings—reswallowing the place: the office, the pond, the whole island. And you imagined those plastic geese rising up, flying off in a V shaped like an arrowhead, their beaks moving (open, close) in silent honking, which might have been prayers, or might have been screaming.
Because they didn’t need anything solid to exist, or anything unsolid either, but you did, or at least you thought you did—though whether it was the solid earth or the murmuring black underneath, you weren’t sure.
It was pretty fun, you told your mom later—a pretty good drug, all in all. Not one you’d do recreationally, there wasn’t enough of a high, but not bad at blacking out what needed to be blacked out, and keeping in some strange sliver of what didn’t matter, what meant nothing to nothing: the geese and the gray light of the gray afternoon. Which was, after all, all it was meant for.
It’s vampire season in Oakland.
We sit at the bar, piles of cash and cigarettes and half-drunk bottles of wine—another end to another shift. It’s past midnight, and we’re all tired, itching to get home. “Just another ten minutes, I swear!” JL calls from the loft.
We sit there—all four of us—off the clock and waiting. Because we can’t leave someone to walk out alone.
I used to wonder as a little kid which would be worse: to live with werewolves or vampires? Werewolves could pulverize through anything, but you only had to deal with them one night a month. Vampires, on the other hand, were tricky, the color of shadows, and out there every single night. As soon as the sun went down, the streets would become a different thing, sinister, a free-for-all, an anything-goes zone where at any moment a pale, hungry creature could leap out and attack. And you could harbor illusions about fighting them off, but really, what were the chances you could actually drive a stake through their heart? You’d be defenseless, and all they’d see would be your virgin neck and throbbing vein and they’d want a drink—a drink of blood that was now theirs.
I imagined the constant stress, the constant level of awareness, the little ways that living with such creatures would reshape your life (“I left something in my car. Oh well, I’ll have to get it in the morning; not worth risking it.”), and in the end, I’d always decide that vampires were worse.
And it’s a similar feeling in Oakland right now—that when the sun goes down, the shadows come alive, and go on the hunt. There’s been a rash of robberies and violent assaults among the circles I frequent, enough that I can’t discount it as the usual fifth-most-dangerous-city-in-the-country shenanigans. No one can.
I forget how much it’s there, this constant consideration in the back of my head. I won’t take the train into the city if it means I’ll be coming home after dark; I don’t want to risk the walk back to my car from the station. I don’t go jogging at night—or at least, I drive up into Piedmont to do it. I suck it up and pay for parking in order to park right outside the restaurant I work at, so I again don’t have to risk walking farther than I have to.
But it’s gone a step further this year. After two guys I worked with got robbed at gunpoint leaving the restaurant, we stopped walking out even in pairs—we all leave work together now. After a girl from another restaurant got abducted, robbed and tortured, we won’t even let our manager stay late, even if her car is literally 50 feet from the door. She rearranges her schedule so that she comes in early, gets her office work done, and can leave with everyone else.
It’s like being a prisoner in a way. There’s no comfort in the fact that the fear applies equally to men and women, or that it’s not even fear that drive you all, but rather a statistical likelihood. When a third guy you work with got his nose broken last week, the reaction was largely anger—at him. “What the fuck was he doing thinking he could walk three blocks by himself?”
I keep thinking about Tirana, about my first late night at a bar, when everyone I’d come with had left.
“Where can I catch a cab?”
“A cab? You can walk, you know, it’s only 15 minutes.”
“Yeah, I know, but it’s late, and I’m alone…”
“Oh, but it’s totally safe.”
“I’d rather not risk it.”
A laugh. “Listen. In five years at the hostel, we’ve never heard of anyone ever having a problem.”
And it felt strange, walking through the two am streets, a foreign girl by herself. I couldn’t stop checking my back, walking briskly, staring down the few strangers I passed.
But eventually, I got used to it. And I almost felt giddy, elated by this strange sense of freedom—a sudden lightness and ease. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re missing until you get a taste of something better.
Just after one of the guys at work who got robbed, he posted a really telling Facebook status: “I knew it was bound to happen, living in Oakland caught up with me.” And it kind of broke my heart, because at times I feel the same way—like I’m just waiting for my number to be drawn. That I can be as careful and cautious as I’d like, but eventually, one day, I’ll let my guard down or take a risk, and it’ll be me, my turn, my time to get bitten.
When we finally walk out, it’s after one am. “That,” I sigh, “was not 10 minutes.”
“Nope.”
“But it’s not like we coulda left her there.”
“Nope.”
And we get in our cars and drive own separate homes, where we’ll circle to find the closest spot, walk briskly to the gate and slam it shut, tightly behind us.
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