ABlog

I just spent Saturday afternoon scooping fallen leaves into enormous brown paper bags. This is a new thing, a Sanitation Department experiment in selected areas of Brooklyn; as a promotional gimmick, this year the bags were available for free at the Botanic Garden. You set your leaves out on the curb on a designated date and they’re collected for composting, paper and all. After finishing the bagging, I went for a walk and saw big piles of plastic bags containing leaves. A few days ago, I’d seen the Latino workers from a gardening service that seems to be popular on neighboring blocks creating those bags and now the leaves have wilted slightly and there’s condensation on the inside of the plastic. It seems like the Sanitation Department could so easily dump out the leaves and add them to the compost, but I’m sure they won’t take the time. The plastic bags will go into a landfill. Of course I wonder if they’ll even really compost my correctly bagged leaves but I choose to have faith, or at least not think about it. I've always felt a resistance to sweeping my yard trash into plastic bags and now I can imagine that the detritus that’s too much for my backyard compost bin will find a home in the earth by other means.

Last night, a companion and I saw Sekou Sundiata’s extraordinary multimedia theater work “The 51st (Dream) State” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The performance includes poetic monologues spoken by Sekou, instrumental and vocal music, recorded voices, and spectacular screened projections that offer a backdrop to the live performances. Conceived as a post-9/11 exploration of the actual and possible meanings of citizenship, the piece combines the author’s autobiographical meditations about growing up Black in an America that produced the murder of Emmet Till with interviews of several citizens from targeted immigrant backgrounds (a Japanese-American survivor of the World War II internment, a Palestinian-American who speaks of feeling that her loyalties are always suspect). A virtuoso riff on the word “nigger” in the form of a witty and frightening list poem punctuated with the phrase “nigger, please” definitely helps the production realize Sekou’s stated objective of “implicating the audience.” The recorded voices of Cornel West and Jacob Needleman raise questions about the possibilities for a renewed, communally enhancing, spiritually productive interrogation of citizenship in the era of American imperial ambitions and 9/11-propelled fears. Although it’s not necessarily the strongest impression I personally received from the piece—for me, the impact of the storytelling and some of the music was far deeper than any idea it contains—I came away with the feeling that “The 51st (Dream) State” wants to insist on the crucial importance of reinventing America as America.

“I guess I just don’t have what it takes to think the large thoughts,” my companion commented afterwards, as we waited for a bus. “I never give a thought to something like the meaning of citizenship. As far as I’m concerned, America is just there, just a place I happen to be.” My companion, as it happens, is a naturalized citizen, and a strong critic of the follies of nationalism no matter which national entity they happen to sprout from, so I didn’t think the comment was as apolitical as it might have sounded. I did wonder to what extent this attitude comes from my companion’s having lived a diasporic existence, within a Caribbean community where economic necessity combined with changing immigration policies has divided families, scattering their members to different national entities: the U.S., Canada, and England. I compared my own unforgiving anger at America to Sekou’s more measured embrace of its possible reinvention and thought that perhaps my attitude—my willingness to give up on the American prospect—has something to do with the fact that my own family never had as much at stake in the realization of a truly democratic national agenda as did anyone whose forebears experienced America at its worst by being enslaved on this soil.

Of course I know that my anger and rejection—my “hatred” of America—is also a form of involvement, of being, in my own white female Oregon-born way, just as American as Sekou is in his way, an identity my theater companion will never have to cope with, formal citizenship aside. Especially post-9/11, for an American to say she hates America is akin to committing the sin against the Holy Ghost, but it’s true: I do. Hate. (Even following the recent election, which left me stupid with hope—not so much for America as for the world, given the suggestion that the brake failure recently experienced by the imperial juggernaut may not be total.) I’ve been reading Baghdad Burning, the Feminist Press compilation of blogs written by a young Iraqi woman under the pseudonym Riverbend, and I like the approach she takes to this problem, a precise specification of times when she “hates” the American troops in her country:

I hated them all through the bombing….I hated them on April 11—a cool, gray day: the day our family friend lost her husband, her son and toddler daughter when a tank hit the family car as they were trying to evacuate….I hated them for two hours on July 13. As we were leaving Baghdad, we were detained with dozens of other cars at a checkpoint in the sweltering, dizzying heat….I hated them on April 28 when they shot and killed over a dozen kids and teenagers in Fallojeh…. (Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq, p. 14).

Taking my clue from Riverbend, I think it would make more sense to list specific times when I love or hate America, rather than to embrace a global attitude. Except that I’m not really convinced that any of the things I love—like what happened on Tuesday (“love” not because those gutless Democrats gave W. a “thumpin” but because The People finally said “there is some shit I will not eat”)—is, in its essence, “American” rather than human, or local, or continental.

These are a few of my favorite “American” things:

Emily Dickinson
Flatbush Avenue, with its Caribbean multitudes
The Oregon beach at Manzanita
The aerial views of open, Western spaces that were projected on the wall during one segment of “The 51st (Dream) State”
Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, which I’m currently teaching to my Advanced Fiction class
The Spanish language
My Colombian immigrant friend Jaime saying to me, “It’s great about the election…but then you think about the war, all those lives lost. Who’s going to pay for that? Where is the accountability?”
Working with my undergraduate and graduate students on their writing—telling stories that matter in beautiful language; making gorgeous images hang together in poems
The trees of North America
A queer sensibility
Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony
Haro Strait
Truth
Women in groups
Ackee and saltfish
Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five recordings from the 1920’s….

America “made” some of these things; other items on the list just happened to wash up on these shores. The question, however, is: does any of these things depend on an entity called “America” for its continued existence and well-being?

Taking a leaf (as it were) from my yard cleanup experience, I think that the best ideas and forms thrown up by our weird and problematic history as a nation ought to be pulped, shredded, bagged, and dumped into the compost bin of the human race. Let America the notion, the nation, and, yes, the empire be broken up into its constituent parts; separate out the poisonous elements, inject them into salt caverns far beneath the earth’s surface, and let the remainder marinate in a huge wooden bin with a lot of other healthy scraps from other discontinued nations.

Let North America revert to just land, and people.

Might as well get used to the idea. Because, sooner or later—quite possibly Hurricane Katrina was the harbinger—we’re going to see the continent’s revenge upon the nation.