Over the past few weeks, I’ve been caught up in time travel, reading Daniel Singer’s Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours?, a work of post-fall-of-the-Berlin-wall political economy. Published in 1999, the book is on the one hand strikingly relevant—with the just-completed passage of Cafta (the Central American Free Trade Agreement), Singer’s dissection of the reign of market fundamentalism seems more relevant than ever; on the other hand, because it was written before 9/11/01 and the “Global War on Terror”—oh, excuse me, I meant the “Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism”—it seems to hail from prehistoric times. Simultaneously, I’ve been reading (in manuscript) Jocelyn Lieu’s unpretentious, devastating 9/11 memoir, What Isn’t There, which has made me realize that 9/11/01 itself seems to have occurred almost unimaginably long ago.
This morning, while struggling to get some control over my piles of half-drafted poems and other writing ideas (“If seven maids with seven mops swept for half a year/think you, by chance, the Walrus said, that they could get it clear? I doubt it, said the Carpenter, and shed a bitter tear”), I came across the following unpublished essay, drafted in fall, 2001. Reading it over, I’m amazed at what I’ve already forgotten in the way not merely of details, but of a mood I experienced less than four years ago. Here’s what I wrote then:
This Is a Test
My local Brooklyn post office, Lefferts Station, offers notoriously bad service. On my last visit there in normal times, before the twin towers fell, the line was even more sluggish than usual. With only one or two windows in operation, the clerks moved at the familiar unhurried pace. As is often the case, I was the only light-skinned person present, most of the patrons reflecting the predominantly Black Caribbean character of the adjacent neighborhood. The line’s inching progress, worthy of Soviet Russia, was presided over by a ceiling-mounted TV; the vocal protests of an exasperated customer competed with the soap opera sound track.
Vocal unrest is far from unknown in my post office, but this time the protester was unusually eloquent. Speaking truth to a power vacuum, she was getting quite a bit of acknowledgment from her fellow captives of the USPS, as she dissected the local workings of institutional racism: “Look at all these people just waiting for service. Excuse me, I want to speak to a supervisor! You won’t see these terrible lines in Sheepshead Bay! Think about it, this kind of nonsense only happens in the neighborhoods!” A fellow sufferer, male, seconded her emotion, lamenting that Black people haven’t figured out how to unite to solve their problems. The two then discussed the Civil Rights Movement, debating whether anything had gotten better since then. The woman felt that, on balance, there’d been an improvement: “Now we can ride on the bus like everybody else, so things have gotten a little bit better.”
The neighborhood so poorly served by Lefferts Station Post Office is where I was fortunate to be when the world caved in—at home, in fact, in my comfortable, spacious home, one of a row of single-family limestones on a pretty, famously integrated though probably still majority Black block very different in class terms from the surrounding working-class area. My partner Winston, a public interest lawyer who works several blocks from what is now “ground zero,” was out of the country. He had flown to his native Grenada on September 8th for the funeral of a close family member. Most of his Brooklyn relatives had accompanied him, and of course there were frantic phone calls back and forth. On Wednesday morning (the 12th), I finally reached him; he asked me to contact a cousin of his who hadn’t been heard from.
I called the cousin, Donna, repeatedly but she never answered, and eventually I decided to walk over to her house, which is a forty-five minute bus ride from my place. I walked because the weather was so horribly beautiful, and because I wasn’t sure of the bus route, and because I couldn’t focus or get anything else done, and because I had never traveled to Donna’s directly, nor been there in the daytime, and I thought this was a chance to get better acquainted with a section of Brooklyn I know very little of, despite having lived in the borough for over 25 years.
The walk, which took an hour or so, lay entirely through Black Caribbean neighborhoods, and I was much struck by the physical evidence of the huge size of Brooklyn’s Caribbean population. I know of no other section of Brooklyn where I could walk for an hour and encounter only one basic ethnic group (notwithstanding important distinctions like the predominance of Haitians along a section of Church Avenue, as opposed to areas where one sees mostly people from the English-speaking Caribbean). As I walked, I thought angrily, and no doubt self-righteously, of the pronouncements I was hearing from standard media sources: “Who knows if we’ll again find the ease of expectations of normal American life?” NPR had inquired. How many Haitian-Americans (I wondered) were in shock at the discovery that History is not a safe space?
When I got to Donna’s, she was home, and certainly surprised to see me. I flashed on an occasion when I’d accompanied Winston on a visit to a sick relative whose home care attendant had looked at me and asked: Is this the physical therapist? My being a hired professional had evidently struck her as the most logical explanation for why a random white lady would be showing up at that particular door.
Recovering from her momentary disorientation, Donna was fine, and delighted to see me—it turned out she simply hadn’t heard the telephone. She offered me tamarind candy and regaled me with the story of her evacuation from an office building in Long Island City, Queens. She’d walked over the Williamsburg Bridge, on the theory that it was less likely to be attacked than the Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridges. We chatted and sat watching her TV, as Boston tactical police surrounded a Copley Square hotel and raided an empty room possibly once occupied by a terrorist.
“I move through social spaces/dappled: dark: light” I wrote some months ago in an unfinished poem that tries to get at experiences like these. In the aftermath of the horror that so many of us absent-mindedly refer to as “the bombing,” I keep getting the image of an angiogram, that test by means of which flaws in the cardiovascular system are revealed via X-rays made after the patient is injected with a dye. I imagine that in the moment when the first airplane struck, the dye began to pump through the system of the local body politic; as the days pass, we see more and more clearly the terrifyingly precise, detailed map of who we New Yorkers are, and what connects us, and what divides us.
This is not, of course, how many are responding. We are hearing that everyone is united in disaster, that people from more than 60 nations perished in the towers, that in the apocalyptic moment there was no thought of difference. I know the truth of this from my own experience, for in the wake of the attack I felt what I believe to have been universal emotions: fear for self and world, for the meanings that organize our lives on the most basic level. Grief and terror at the thought of so many deaths, and the manner of them. Guilt at the effort to avoid the thought of what it’s like to jump from a burning skyscraper, or fall out of opening elevator doors with one’s charred skin sloughing off in the would-be rescuer’s hands, or yell for help into your radio from a fire truck buried under rubble. Anger at the abstract brilliance that planned this attack in radical denial of the truth that such cruelty can only engender more cruelty, waves of evil pulsing out from the fiery core to scar if not engulf every corner of this small, fragile planet. Gratitude and amazement at the heroism [note on 8/23/05—I would never use this word today, will never be able to bear the word “hero” again after its flagrant misuse by the patriot-scoundrels] of those who strove so hard to save something, and in too many cases were unable to save even themselves.
I feel a fierce, grieving love for my city—“the capital of the world,” as the cliché goes, though it did not sound like a cliché to me when I heard it from the Palestinian man who runs the corner store two blocks from my house: “This thing hurts us more than anyone. New York is the capital of the world, because so many people from all different places live here side by side. This is just terrible for us, yet some fool comes and yells, ‘Arabs get out!’”
On the day following this conversation, I attended a nonviolence training for people who want to extend support to Brooklyn’s Arab-American and Muslim communities. The session was run by War Resisters League and held in the basement of Park Slope Methodist Church. It attracted a large, overwhelmingly white crowd. My spirits dipped: here we go again, I thought—yet what had I expected? My multi-decade history of participation in mostly white “progressive” groups had been frustrating enough that I’d vowed to cease and desist from that particular mode of trying to create social change. Yet now my scruples felt self-indulgent. Anyway, wasn’t my response really a reflection of shame at having failed to be part of a successful move to shift these old segregationist dynamics?
The nonviolence training included a role play, done in pairs, where one member of the pair expressed anti-Arab sentiments while the other tried to get through to the bigot’s “humanity.” Afterwards, we spoke about the importance of finding responses attuned to the strengths and vulnerabilities of the individual activist, but this was construed mostly in terms of personality. We did not explore how race or gender or social class—let alone sexuality or disability—might affect the situation. And at the time I did not notice this crucial fact. It was only afterwards that I started to think about my complex position as a white person in a mostly Black neighborhood who attempts to extend support to an Arab shopkeeper. Later, when an activist friend of mine told me he’d heard that the situation was particularly tense for the Arab-American community in Bay Ridge, my questions exploded. What would it mean to go into such a situation, offering solidarity, with a mostly white group versus a meaningfully integrated one? Would Winston, or my African-American friend C., be well advised to sign up for such an expedition?
I ran into a former writing student, a young Asian-American woman who was despondent over the world situation, the calls for retaliation, and her feelings of helplessness. I told her about the nonviolence training, framing it as a hopeful sign but alluding to its demographic limitations. Her response was strongly emotional: she’d heard of the training, and thought of attending, but, “I asked myself, what can I do? Anybody who hates Arabs is going to lump me in with them.” I looked at her dark brown skin and long black wavy hair and told her she was absolutely right.
It is the most universal of times, it is the most particular of times. By some strange paradox, the same cruel and unusual test that—as the professional talkers say—is so rigorously proving our moral fiber is also performing angiography on the body politic. On the one hand, we can all appreciate Roy Lichtenstein’s revision of his famous “I heart NY” logo, with a corner of the heart darkened to represent the new damage. On the other, we need to look at a more complex picture that shows all the capillaries, all the subtle gradations of plaque buildup, all the possible and likely sites for another heart attack.
Many have remarked on how the timing of the assault on the twin towers insured the deaths of service workers and low-level administrative staff, while sparing those in the upper echelons who get to work later. An article in the Times is headlined “Money for Victims of Attack Could Vary Widely” and points out: “Across a vast landscape of need—from those supported by dishwashers and bond traders, firefighters and security guards—the flow of death benefits for survivors, so far, looks jaggedly uneven.” A sister of Winston’s noted the stark whiteness of the funeral services for some of the martyred firefighters. Her comment was factual, reflecting no bitterness—yet I’m thinking of the blues songs written after the sinking of the Titanic that expressed bemusement at the disastrous culmination of a segregated voyage.
The question here is not whether one identifies, but how. Winston’s sister was in St. Vincent shortly after the attack; she reports how people there wept and prayed amid the same compulsive television viewing that most New Yorkers experienced. My friend C., recently returned from Ghana, reports receiving calls from Ghanaians expressing concern for her welfare, combined with anxiety about what this blow to America might mean for Ghana’s economic prospects.
There is no linearity here, no sure formula for predicting responses. Many of my Black neighbors have hung out American flags. A gay male neighbor (white) who, as an AIDS activist and service provider, has spent most of the last eight years in sometimes bitter confrontation with the Giuliani administration, heartily seconds my sheepish avowal of some recent feelings of gratitude to the mayor we’ve loathed so long and so justly. It’s obviously because of sentiments like this that Village Voice columnist Wayne Barrett can claim that mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer’s “Other New York” message “no longer resonates.” Any day now, voices will be raised to admonish us that this terrible event shows up the follies of identity politics and proves the virtue of seeing the lowest common denominator. Yet I keep seeing two images superimposed: that single, hurt heart that represents us all and the X-ray that reveals with such scary clarity how precisely targeted those attacks were.
The other night, I marched with a somewhat integrated but still basically white throng from Union Square to Times Square, chanting for peace. “Our grief is not a call for war” read my favorite sign. On the street corners, we saw Latino men and women trying to sell American flags, the urgency in their faces reminding me of Managua. In the streets around the theater district, vendors—probably immigrants as well—had set up tables with every conceivable image of lower Manhattan and its intact twin towers. My friend C., who lives near Times Square, spoke of seeing the teenage son of a local Lebanese restaurant owner deriding some Mexican workers in a rival restaurant, threatening them with deportation.
What is so eerie and fascinating about this moment is that the powers that be in Washington have staked their bid for an all-out resurgence of nationalist militarism on the wounds of this most anomalous of American cities, the one with a huge proportion of recent immigrants, the one possibly best fitted to challenge such a move. It’s the cumulative effects of “Giuliani time”—by which I mean not only or even primarily the actions of one man, but the collective and individual flaws implied by New York’s failure to attain an alternative to Rudy—that leave us so ill-prepared for what awaits. Perhaps it is the mark of a world-class crisis to encompass every local problem, every particular insult under its universal umbrella. The test results are still coming in, but we’ve seen enough to be pretty clear that mounting a halfway adequate response is going to have to mean changing everything.