Joy Garden

The space, the time, the resources are all privileges, tools we have used to make the garden grow. The work has kept us sane, kept us looking forward to something. We built the beds in early April, just into quarantine. I remember standing in line outside Home Depot in Bed-Stuy as one of the first times we really saw other people, all of us spaced out in the parking lot. Being in the store felt scary, like a tactical mission, but we got the wood, some soil, some seeds. I started planting tomatoes indoors soon after. It really felt like nothing would happen. We had no choice but to wait anyway, and as we did, we picked up some seedlings along the way: hot peppers, lemon verbena, and that bright red plant is called “Chaos.” We also put some spinach straight into the beds, wild flowers besides. Then the tomatoes started coming up, and we started to plant them, some cucumbers, and after some hot days and some rain, the zucchini suddenly just took over. We’ve pulled weeds, laid mulch, tried little ornaments to scare the birds. Now the whole network of it is starting to blossom and fruit. 

Through all this, I continue to read and write, to think about identity, to listen about race, to engage in and begin to practice the power of intersectionality. For now I have two very high recommendations: Ross Gay’s (a gardener himself) Book of Delights is a testament to engaging with wonder and care and One Egbuonu’s debut documentary, (In)Visible Portraits is a gorgeous and moving framing of Black womanhood in the US. I am certain that exercising our creativity will sustain us as we elucidate the difficult and fruitful paradoxes of this life

With the garden we’re biding our time, waiting to decide when to go in for a taste, what to cut back and tie up, relying both on advice and on our own intuition. I’m trying again with the basil and hoping for more flowers, talking to them when I remember to, softly, softly. Not a victory garden, a sanity garden, a patience garden, a joy garden. 

White silence, white noise

Last Wednesday, first protest in years, a rally that meant standing an hour and a half in the hot sun: My feet hurt, my back ached. We had our bikes with us which felt awkward, standing in the center of the growing crowd at the rally for #blm and #defundthepolice at Grand Army Plaza last Wednesday. We didn’t even have any signs. The loudest voice in my head said: What right do I have to be here? Shouldn’t I at least have a sign? But what sign? I looked around and was struck by "White Silence is Violence." The slant rhyme, the implication of blood and bodies torn apart, it’s been stuck in my head since. I’m attracted to it, but also I’m scared of it.

If I were to reason with “White Silence is Violence,” I might say, does that mean that White Noise/Voicing/Loudness is Peace? Of course not. Similar as with the fallacy of the “All Lives Matter” retort, of course we need to recognize the intent of the statement and the context it’s being used in. White Silence is Violence indicates that doing nothing when you can do something causes harm, and the next step is to deepen the “something” I do. Or maybe I am skipping a step. First, I need to understand my “nothing,” my “silence.”

One thing I’ve only been able to admit to myself since this recent surge protests started is that, over the last decade, I’ve consistently blocked the anti-racist efforts of white friends and peers. I’ve dismissed hard work by my department colleagues to include more anti-racist material in our classes as irrelevant to my International students and my vision of myself as teaching process and not content. Both implicitly and explicitly, I’ve shut down calls for specifically anti-racist language in organizing principles for groups and events I’ve participated in. I have said such language and such work is outside of my skillset, as well as--my favorite tactic--saying that the language of “diversity and inclusion” is b.s. speak to make white people comfortable.

Instead, I have opted to keep ideas about harm we perpetrate and receive based on perceived identity personal and close, to trust I can battle the ills of discrimination in my own, private ways and, somehow, that will reverberate out. Maybe this is true. A little teeny tiny bit. But, I have reasoned and intellectualized my way out of things. Something new and much bigger I can see clearly now is that my dismissal of organized efforts has served to make me, a white-passing person, comfortable, and to avoid the hard work of engaging in collaborative efforts to shift the tide against White Supremacy and Anti-Blackness.

While in many cases efforts around “diversity and inclusion” may be empty exercises of posturing empathy, there are myriad efforts and resources out there that I have access to that can help me to create and use language to truly advance my own anti-racist pedagogies and practices, and instead of turning my gaze from them in fearful, lazy, embarrassed silence (which it turns out is actually quite loud), it’s time to look towards them with trust and quiet, to work to turn discomfort into patience, to accept the riches surrounding me… I turn with gratitude to all my friends and colleagues who have been doing anti-racist work with others and seek to learn from them with an open heart… I look back over all your emails and posts and resource lists and conversations, and I begin again...

On Saturday, I rode my bike past a disbanded protest and saw a woman, sitting on a bench, holding a sign with that same slogan again, "White Silence is Violence." It raised that feeling of discomfort and attraction in me again, and this time I had the wherewithal to take the picture.

Upside-down Sky

These tiny flowers growing up wild. Beautiful weeds. How long will their colors dot the ditches and fields here? I'm thankful for them today, and for my feet to carry me down the fast, fast road near the quiet, sun-filled house where I am thankful to be staying these few days. Thankful for the screened in porch, for country roads. The fresh tomatoes, the song birds, trees newly bursting with green, the hawks seemingly suspended under an impossible sky, then swooping gently over the sloping lawn to nab a worm, a squirrel, thankful, even, for the bird scat that fell into my lap as another one of those predators swooped overhead. 

The idea of leaving Brooklyn for the first time since late March was one we eased into slowly. And as we navigated our way out of the city, I was shocked by the amount of activity in the street, the (mostly-masked) people seeming eager to get back to life. There was something in that journey that made me think, we can do this, we can function again, we can find ways to trust the world and each other, to feel safe in each other's embrace. Being set free on that gorgeous day, I felt sad to leave Brooklyn, the site of so much pain and joy, but I needed a break. I knew I would be coming back.

George Floyd was murdered on Monday; peaceful protests began on Tuesday... Sunday now and the news I've seen and social media I've scrolled show a world, again, turned on its head. It's as if the pandemic slowed us down, filled us up with its uncertainty, and then someone shook a big bottle and mixed us all up with and let it go... all over everything. 

From this side of the tv it's all very loud and awful and hard to fathom, an incomprehensible narrative of yelling reporters, of masks and uniforms and raised fists and broken glass and flame, seas of bodies across streets and bridges, satellite feeds from everywhere, converging here, on this screen...but of course it is happening, needs to happen, should happen. My heart slows and I find my breath as I turn the tv off, get close to the flowers, think, George Floyd, drown in the upside-down sky, George Floyd... 

Nothing Was Ever Normal

I thought I was at a new phase with all of this when I woke up one day last week and wasn't confused about what dimension I was in and knew exactly what was happening in the world outside my front door. A pandemic? Right: a pandemic; this isn't a drill; this is the life we all share, right here, right now. It's as real as can be, real as the mask fogs up my glasses, real as the online classes I've been getting more comfortable with, as the fact that I am teaching students scattered between here and China all at once, real as the fact that the only other person I've significantly interacted with in the real, physical world is Lee and likely still will be for a while, real as the weekly grocery runs, the trips to parks and waterfronts, the outings that make me feel we are criminals, escaped. The situation in New York is real, real as can be, real as the sirens we all hear constantly, the hospital tents I kept reading about and finally saw on our drive down to Coney Island yesterday. And like many of us I've been been reading about the numbers of people who can't breathe anymore, about those who are taking care of them and all they are sacrificing for us, for this. I know about the ones getting really sick really fast and dying alone at home, the ones spraying down every surface, the ones racing around the city to try and help who they can, the ones working feverishly in labs to understand all this, the mathematicians, statisticians, magicians, all the -icians. In one moment, I can grasp at all this and in the other, I am struck dumb again, feel like I'm living some silly future sci-fi prank of a dream. The phrase "new normal" is always on the tip of my brain and I hate it; I really, really hate it because of the complacency it implies, both the word itself, but also to the use of it. I think about the future and I think about the past, and I just can't really see how the present has anything to do with either of these other times anymore, but it must. And let's just keep one thing straight if we can: nothing was ever normal. 

Yesterday the realest thing I saw in New York , this city who wears her abnormal histories on all her surfaces, was Coney Island, that strange dream of a place, strange dream millions of years before all this corona-stuff ever was. Anyway, it was a chilly spring day in Coney Island, sky drying after a morning rain, layers of blue/purple/gray clouds, a band of emerald green sea, the birds suspended above it, screeching, and us humans somewhere in between sky/sea/sand/and our own muffled breaths. It was cold but felt so fresh, sweet, full, and we walked the length of the boardwalk, past handfuls of other people, past all the fairgrounds and food stands shuttered and forgotten. And we turned down the long fishing peer, where men fished, and others wandered, among them this woman, pictured here, who I watched walk blank-eyed to the end and look out at the expanse, while she mouthed a prayer and crossed herself, again and again, gently touching her own forehead as she whispered into the air, then quickly retraced her steps, fell out of view.