Wandering the City of Detroit

Being on the road lesson #1: don't expect yourself to get as much done as you planned. I had this grand plan to write about each of the places I had visited right away, publishing a post a week, doing them all justice... alas. You'll just have to settle for my retrospective. We'll start where I just left:, Detroit. Eventually I'll get to San Diego, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Indiana. Now let's get moving!

I've been walking for days. Not having access to a car in the Motor City makes it pretty difficult to navigate the spread-out landscape. My pedometer cheerfully chirped out that I was a marathoner yesterday - a real neighborhood Olympian.

I've been taking a breather here to reflect and rest. I'd come from a writer's conference in Indiana that was jam-packed with inspiration but after a 5 days on a tight schedule and surviving on campus cafe salads, I needed something else. It's easier to sleep in when you don't feel like you'll miss out on some life-altering piece of information shared by your lecturer.

In my walking, I've seen a great swath of town. One one day, I went from Wayne State to John K. King warehouse of used books and back. Some pockets are going strong - the fancy coffee shops and pocket art galleries, the student areas with newly paved sidewalks - while others are a study in contrasts. Like the buildings downtown where, at one end of the block, you can order a $7 coffee drink and at the other stands a beautiful roped-off building with all its windows shattered. There's endless construction and demolition.

As a reader from afar, I romanticized Detroit for its arts and activism scene. Radical possibility rising from the collapsed heap of a capitalist ruin is an incredibly sexy metaphor. But, as I should come to expect, the lived reality is a lot more complicated. What I've loved here so far are the neighborhoods. Walking past houses where people say 'hello' from their porches. They have fancy brick turrets, most of them, even on the boarded up houses. I've loved going to free outdoor movies and participating in that DIY life with my host-friends. I'm privileged enough to see how the Motor City does Pride.

But I'm a little embarrassed to say that, of the five cities I've been to in the past two weeks, Detroit was the one I had the most expectations about. I didn't come with any plan other than to see what's here, but I did want this city to answer my question: what does it look like to build something new? And the answer I got was just another question, humbling and unexpected: what does it look like to live when no one's looking out for you?

Some Last Words (on the BZF and Leaving NYC)

Spread of watch parts and descriptions of watchmaker industry.

I'm moving out of NYC, my home of the past six years, today. I'll be setting off for a wild and woolly adventure around the country and the globe (in case you weren't aware of my travel plans, take a look!). I'm going to be taking some time to seriously commit to my work as a writer and healer by first giving myself some well-deserved space and self-nourishment.

But that doesn't mean I haven't been feeling mixed about leaving! I feel like there's a lot that I could still do in NYC, the most recent example being with the Brooklyn Zine Fest response and aftermath. As an update: we donated a good chunk of money to the Audre Lorde Project by soliciting donations during the reinstated Black Lives Matter panel (which I heard went well, based on the Tweets!) and selling Black Women Matter zines via Underground Sketchbook. Several zinesters also donated their proceeds to the cause, which was fabulous. And there were plenty of folks who were interested in continuing the conversation about keeping DIY spaces accountable to POC voices - names/emails were collected and a brainstorming meeting is forthcoming (if you're interested in joining in, email nyczinegroup [at] gmail [dot] com for more info!).

Basically, a lot of energy went into responding. And I'm both grateful for and tired out by it.

Organizing people is not only a logistical challenge, but also emotionally taxing. No matter whether the motivation is a healthy rage or a deep care for someone, it takes a lot of energy. We only have to look to recent news, with unimaginable tragedies from the Nepal earthquake to the protests for Freddie Gray to see that people are putting in tons of emotional labor. And it shouldn't be made invisible. Though only a small drop in comparison, there were moments during this process of putting out a response to BZF, planning my other workshops, while packing where I just wanted to say 'I am a human being with feelings, and I need rest.'

I won't give you another Dispatch from Burnout Land, but I will say how excited I am that I get to choose this upcoming path and spend time to recalibrate. I articulated it best to a friend this week: the work is important, but in many ways I am the work. In the end, I can only change me. As with the nights (and afternoons) when I've crashed after a baby's been born, I must remind myself that sometimes nothing is more important than rest. Taking care of me and knowing my needs/wants help me provide better care to others.

My bags are packed or shipped, I've said many a heartfelt goodbye, and I fly out tonight. Grateful to the many people who have made my experience in NYC both wondrous and survivable, a place of possibility and grand design. Here's to leaving our comforts to see where we can land.

Other things that I've been super proud of recently are: 1) getting my article on the capitalism of jealousy published on BlackGirlDangerous and 2) hosting a really lovely zine workshop at the Brooklyn Museum this past weekend. Take a gander at the article and don't hesitate to Tweet me with your thoughts!

Human Contact

Brown dog with ears up peering out of shadowed doorway.

The skin of my hands; the skin of her back; the beat in my chest; the long pause. Her breath, shuddering.

There are so many things I found impossible to put into words last year. I massage a woman’s back with a feather-light touch as she labors, her body straining with contractions. On the television, the news anchor describes “riots” in Ferguson. This was in the fall – after Mike Brown’s death, before the non-indictment announcement. My stomach twists into knots, but my anger and grief are not useful here. I look over at the woman, still hooked up to too many machines and switch off the monitor.

We breathe together, then separately. At the height of her contractions, it is like no one else in the world is there. I love the feeling of a woman’s hand crushing mine as the rush moves through her; that’s when I can feel her energy engulfing mine, like two soap bubbles merging.

When I am out at a protest, several months later, I go alone. I want contact, but the energy of the protesters has some other quality to it – a buzz rather than a hum. I feel like I am bearing this weight inside that cannot be shared in language, so I march. Onto the pavement of darkened streets and over barricades and finally onto the West Side Highway where they turn off some of the streetlamps as we continue to move uptown. When I finally peel off, I see from afar that the group is shrouded in darkness, occasionally lit with an eerie purple from the mixed red and blue of the cop cars’ lights.

I feel useless. I babble to myself when I get home, and I cut off all my sentences midstream. To listen to me is unintelligible – metaphor, image, plot, concept, but no character. No contact. The skin of her back; the skin of my palms. I think about the philosophical things. I think about what would be useful to say. I want to write something that would heal my incapacitation, the deep sense of hopelessness I feel while watching the news. The beat in my chest; the long pause.

The baby arrives in the early morning, when we are all just about ready to take a nap. My co-doula and her husband have arrived, and we all take shifts, sleeping on hard wooden chairs. It’s when a new doctor arrives that we are all jolted to attention. She’s funny, and actually looks the mother straight in the eye, rather than keeping her gaze trained between her legs. It seems like in no time at all she’s fully dilated and a head covered in hair is spilling out into the doctor’s arms. I let go of the mother’s leg and the doctor places the baby on her chest.

I have to rock back and forth on my feet to stay awake when we are moved out of the labor and delivery ward; our bubble of shared energy has burst and I have started to feel how heavy my own limbs are. When I arrive home, I collapse into a deep sleep and do not write about it for months.

Everything has a gestation period. I’m seeing it in the actions we’re taking against anti-black racism, and I’m seeing it in my writing. I tend to agree with Lynda Barry: I write not to escape this world but to be able to live in it. And damn, did I want to do some escaping. Then I think about that woman’s shuddering breath, the one that called us to action and I remember. This is about making contact.

Thoughts from an Activist Doula in Training

I've always talked about wanting to get more involved with healing work - psychological, physical, and spiritual. These past few months, I've been diving in.

I am naturally drawn to characters who make it their focus to care for others and provide resources. They create change in ways that aren't as visible as putting a banner in the air, and are often too busy to write about their work in Tweets and comment sections. But even if the healing work is labeled as stereotypically feminine (think "soft" and "maternal"), there can be no doubt that the spaces I've entered are kicking major ass in their approach to patriarchal and racialized systems.

The most openly radical space I'm in is doula training - in short: a birth companion who doesn't provide medical attention, but provides emotional care and information (click the link for more!). Reproductive healthcare work in general is awash in politics: whether you are an obstetrician, a midwife, a doula, an abortion provider, or a parent, there's always someone telling you what you should be doing and how. And the norms stated by the media are perpetuated in what resources are funneled dollars. Greater research on the effects of medical intervention? Nah, the medical system is great as it is. Resulting fear around birth? Discredit the midwives, or make it harder for them to get certified training. Try to have support people present? No, they're just getting in the way. And of course: gender roles, gender roles, gender roles.

The focus of a doula is to listen first and provide resources rather than imposing a particular view on the person they are caring for. Funny how that simple act can be revolutionary. But half of our training has been to learn about where we fit into (and sometimes challenge) a medical system that doesn't want us in it. And that can mean everything from providing low- or no-cost services to folks that are uninsured, undocumented, or just have financial hardship. Or that can mean not passing judgment on a pregnant teen or assuming the gender identity of a person asking for services. Or simpler even than that: in our healthcare system today, just having a consistent support behind your choices in birth, labor, abortion/termination, adoption, etc. is radical. And that's something I'm very very drawn to. (Check out Radical Doula for more info on folks that work at this intersection.)

It gives me hope to see how many people are on call literally round the clock to do this work. In their ideal world and mine, mothering is not "soft" or "women's work" with all of its connotations. Mothering can be a form of radical resistance that is not limited by gender and subverts mainstream expectations around care providers. We are part of an ongoing movement, and I am glad to be swept up in its flow.

(psst, you can now buy my zines on Etsy! Check out how you can get Loving Ghosts and back issues of my other zines there)

Grieving for Mandela: The Mess of Loss

 

I will carry with me the memory of when I first found out that Nelson Mandela died. I was in the lobby of a hotel in midtown when my best friend put her hand on my shoulder, pointing to the TV. I didn’t register at first what they were saying, but she repeated: “Nelson Mandela just died.”

There is something about death that makes my teeth ache. It brings me back to other losses. I started Googling the name of my drama teacher from high school who passed away last winter to find her acting profile, and although it was a year ago, I again felt that absence pressing down in my stomach like a stone. I wrote about my naiveté during that time, how I believed “you couldn’t possibly lose someone whom you loved enough.”

I am sure that it is a similar feeling with Mandela for many people. While I can only relate to him as a public figure, someone we talked about in history classes and when I was first getting into radical activism, I am still reminded of the profundity of loss. It can be all-encompassing and make your joints ache like you are old before your time. We are pleased to note that he lived a full life and died at an old age, but the loss still weighs heavy on us.

A member of my community recently died at a rather young age, and though I personally didn’t know them well, their death tipped a whole community into action. It made personal the issues that they was battling with and brought us all out of a collective sleep about things we often think abstractly about. Lack of care, lack of knowledge, slipping through the cracks… Contrary to Mandela’s passing, it felt like their life went unfinished. And many were left raw with their emotions, blowing up at one another because of it.

So, as I am consuming more and more media about Mandela’s life – in the glowing idolized way that we talk about it or in the down-to-earth representations of his life, about the fake sign language interpreter and presidential selfies at the funeral – I am also seeing visions of other grieving periods and other deaths. There is anger there, mixed in with sadness. For those who live on, grieving lets us become liberated with our own emotions.

I don’t want to idolize Mandela’s legacy any further than it already has been. I want to acknowledge that his life was messy, just as messy as the aftermath. I want to hold on to the idea that we are all works in progress, and that death is yet another moment of transition. But I want to go back to my somewhat naïve notion that you cannot lose someone who you have loved enough. I still believe this, though now I think of it as a different kind of process. Sometimes it can be clean. We shave off the excesses, the complications of their life and make them a symbol to play a part in our continued struggle. And sometimes it can be messy. We generate more and more ways to deal with our anger, with our sadness. We do not sit with those emotions unless we are using them to act. And it takes immense effort to cut through all of that to get back to what our main goal was: to love that person enough so that their memory is not lost.

I hope that as we use the stories of our losses in the future as ways to motivate our actions that we may also reflect on these people not only as symbols, but as the same messy individuals that hold us accountable every time we invoke their memory.

Carry Forward, Carry On (or, What to Do When the News is Bad)

I found a title for my short story collection this week. It's often hard for me to find titles -- I'm more of a longform writer in the first place, so if short stories are hard, then you can imagine how a three-word title would send me into hours of contemplation.

I've also been learning a lot about domestic violence and sexual assault response in the past few weeks, and it's often majorly depressing. Anyone can be an abuser and anyone can be a victim/survivor. There are so many ways that people have and can be cruel to one another. As I flip through pages, the story gets bleaker and bleaker. To take a break, I go online and start reading -- about typhoon Haiyan. Perhaps not the best judgment call. I read about all the organizations attempting to provide relief and the hundreds of bodies that haven't yet been found... after a while, I'm closing browser tabs left and right trying to get away from it.

The radical in me is always jotting down notes like this one: "Thinking about how to build people up emotionally in the face of disaster -- give them the power and materials to build their own houses, give them the cash to carry forward with their lives." It's what they try to do with domestic violence cases, to give power to the survivor so they can carry on. Survivors of all kinds share this -- you can't change their experiences, but you can help them integrate the experiences. To weave them into the fabric of their lives, even if some nights they still wake up overtaken by grief and memory.

Sometimes it's the little things that make the most difference.

I can't always read the news as it happens. Sometimes I need to bookmark it and set it aside. I need to think about the big picture sometimes, yes, so that I am able to critique how we provide services and think about how things can be made better (like providing more resources for LGBT survivors of abuse or where I want to donate for Haiyan relief). But other times, I really need to sit back and remember that we can't get to the ideal place by making myself sick with worry. Or depression. Pain is a part of the human condition, I know. But so is resilience.

That three word title, however long they take to get on the page, hold me together through the hundreds and thousands of words detailing casualties and atrocities happening around the world. It is the little thing that keeps me wanting to carry forward. Keep reading, and keep caring.

Work and Relaxation

I'm trying something new today! I wrote my blog post and then read it aloud (speech-like) in a podcast format - this time it's on activist work and relaxation. I've done this before with fictional stories, but not as much with creative non-fiction, so this is my stab at it. Let's hope that after a few tries I can get into a more natural speaking rhythm! Transcript after the jump.

Double Double, Toil and Trouble: A Pump-up Letter to Activists

Caring is hard work.

As all my activist and ally friends know, it can be depressing to open up a newspaper, watch TV, or generally absorb any media about the sorry state of our universe (yes, universe - I get sad reading intergalactic news as well). We forget how our small contributions affect people and make change in all of its local ways; we burn out and think we're not doing enough; we lie awake at nights agonizing about how the next event/protest/workshop will go and whether it will be acceptably radical enough. But, having finished reading Poe as of late, I believe that he has some choice words on this subject.

Activist, Artist, Academic: On Integrating Identities

I was talking with one of my friends from high school recently and, as we nearly always do, started talking about parks.

We hung out a lot late at night, driving around our suburb till my gas tank got down low (and, being Seattlites of a kind, we lamented the carbon emissions) and then we would stop at a park. Sitting in the car, listening to whatever music was available, we planned our escape mission. We would both go to college on the east coast, have fabulous adventures, save the world; we would become non-profit managers and write books and lead colorful lives in all the stereotypically naive ways that teens with ambition look at the future. We thought "if we just get out of here, then we can do whatever we want."

It was only partly true.

Troy Davis Vigil (Images)

This week, I attended the Troy Davis silent vigil on Columbia's campus - in remembrance, we did a small march and then a speak-out about our emotions surrounding his execution. The takeaway? This is our moment: take charge in the issues you care about.

9/11: Growing Up a Reactionary Youth

I went back and forth about whether to write a post about 9/11. In some ways, it is an insignificant day to me - at the time, I was 9 years old and believed that the next target was going to be the Space Needle, which was the only important tall building I could conceptualize in my West Coast upbringing. But it also marked an important turn for the relationship I and my family have to this country. In my work, in my daily life, the specter of that date 10 years ago hangs over me.

I am a Muslim woman, but at that point in time I wasn't cognizant of it. We were not a religious family, and that was a fine thing in my youth. But the label was still on me. Though I could have theoretically passed as a Hindu (because of the common stereotype that all South Asian people are of that religion), I never wanted to hide the fact of my religious affiliation. The conception of Islam that I have now was formed out of a defense for it.

Caught My Eye: Do It Anyway

When I began my summer vacation, I was gung ho to chew through the large shelf of books that I'd neglected to read during the school year. At that point, I didn't quite know yet how strenuous my job at the Washington Bus would be and how little time I would have to gnaw on dense feminist classics and other miscellany.

Of the precious few books that I did end up reading over the summer, Do It Anyway by Feministing's Courtney Martin was by far one of the best. I am a sucker for interviews about amazing activists, for one, but the book also takes upon itself the heavy task of reigniting positivity and inspiration in the activist community, which was refreshing. It acknowledges the hardships and complexities of activist work while injecting some much-needed excitement for the everyday struggle.