Read Lonely in America by Wendy Walters
Multiply/Carve up by Wendy S. Walters
Sarabande Books, August 2015
152 pages / Amazon, Sarabande
Lilliputian Caesars arena recently opened in Detroit. And not without controversy. Critics of the projection have argued for years that the arena was going to be built on the backs of Detroit taxpayers, while the owners of the project, the Ilitch family unit, profits millions. In fact, the urban center contributed over $300 million in tax funds and sold over 30 parcels of land for $1 each for the projection. A recent story in the Metro Times, "How the Ilitches used 'dereliction by blueprint' to get their new Detroit arena," reminds readers how the family unit's real estate arm spent 15 years ownership up the properties in the surface area and let them sit neglected until they were fix to build. Proponents say nothing that has happened was illegal, and in fact the city has willingly supported the programme all along. But this is ane point of impasse in the argument. As residents, visitors, citizens we are told to accept that this is how business organisation works. Developers amass coin and political power and the rest of us are supposed to be grateful to pay for their projects and profits. We are told information technology'southward the just solution to the bug of urban decay, or given other limited explanations. But every bit the Metro Times commodity points out, neighborhoods surrounding the state bought to sit empty in anticipation of structure have revitalized as role of the recovery, particularly within the downtown and Wayne State University areas.
In Multiply/Divide: On the American Read and Surreal, Wendy S. Walters engages topics including urban evolution, public housing, multiracial identity, and personal history. Reading Multiply/Carve up is a reality-cheque bout through the spatial layers of gimmicky Black and multiracial American experience connected through history. Like some of Ta-Nehisi Coates essays, it continually reminds readers that we can't dissever history out and abroad from the present, but that cognition and understanding fluctuate between immediate experience and historical perspective. Walters pushes against the class of the essay as genre, alternating fictional and nonfictional pieces to show how reflection on the gimmicky tin can give us different perspectives on history than we might accept had before. She offers a note at the starting time that some of the pieces are journalistic, some are fictional, and some are a combination. The stories and essays are often constructed of layered fragments, connected through theme and personal reflection, and present multiple letters simultaneously across a mural of description and lingering. In some of the essays, Walters describes walking through her neighborhood in NYC and we go this feeling of a journey that sometimes meanders, in the structure of the writing itself. Even the more journalistic pieces detour through the personal, or aggrandize and contract through historical and contextualizing detail to give u.s.a. the sense of moving through comprehension. Readers are pulled into the intersections of narrative and reportage in ways that teach us how to be in multiplicity, or to call up more about what that ways in every day terms. The title seems to reflect on the expansion and fragmentation of history over fourth dimension and dissimilar ways of conceptualizing the gimmicky. Every bit individuals we are multiplied and divided by manner of history, personal feel, and cultural narratives, and equally we continuously plow our view to encounter from alternate perspectives the spaces between the real and what comes to feel surreal, mistiness. The interspersed fictional pieces in Multiply/Divide offer other perspectives on the truths of our everyday lives, considering sometimes fiction tin can ameliorate clear these. Of course, the boundaries are always field of study to shifting and exceeding definition, not unlike the contemporary reality of people trying to survive in the intersections.
*
Public housing in NYC has a circuitous history that includes progressive intentions in the pursuit of fair housing and social good. Unfortunately, the history also includes the conflicts and consequences of private vs public ownership and direction, political fighting, and the almost total fail that now seems obviously continued to the fact that the bulk of public housing residents are people of color. In two essays Walters writes about living in Manhattanville, that history of social, budgetary, and racial fail is contrasted with the shiny new glass buildings and multi-million-dollar construction projects.
Walters writes,
Later the academy decided to increment in size by building a campus in our part of the metropolis, they purchased dozens of buildings, and then exerted minimal try in maintaining them. This process of neglect began years before I met my husband… in spite of our relative newness to the neighborhood something nearly the academy's expansion felt invasive once the sabotage began. all day we watched cerise and yellowish cranes bob and pivot against a gray sky. (60)
It's not an uncommon story. In Detroit, many of the neighborhoods were in busted, not merely because homeowners couldn't afford budget, just considering the urban center couldn't go on up either: streets were crumbling, streetlights didn't work, and empty houses sometimes took upwards more space on blocks than inhabited ones. For many years, the downtown seemed empty except for sporting or cultural events that brought in crowds who then left once more and collection back to wherever they came from. In many of the neighborhoods, some of this is nonetheless true. Though the city has been fixing streetlights and taking down hundreds of empty houses leaving acres of open country in their place, much of the revitalization in the downtown expanse hasn't spread to the outer neighborhoods. Today loft apartments and condos in some parts of Detroit rival the loftier rents in other large cities; restaurants and shopping cater to a crowd with enough disposable income to spend on the newest trends. Critics argue that it often looks like gentrification, and gentrification tends to mean white people and businesses with money moving in and pushing out anyone who tin can't beget the revitalized price tags. Of course, everyone wants to encounter improvements in the city. But some enquire, at what cost? It'due south easy to over-simplify as a choice between letting the city remain in tatters, or be revamped according to neoliberal corporate models of urban planning. But information technology does oft feel like cities are beingness sold to the highest bidders—or in this example, the lowest bidders—who develop without much pushback from city governments, equally if it is the only option.
This exercise of "dereliction by design"—subjecting whole neighborhoods to decimation over time before clearing and rebuilding—happens at the literal feet of residents who accept petty voice in the chat. Read this way, Walters' alternating between fiction and nonfiction, narratives and fragments suggests a subject caught in a liminal space between the real and surreal. The narrator is often simultaneously working to make sense of the incomprehensible and be content to linger in spaces of unknowing. There aren't arguments and conclusions, only occasional moments of clarity, and other moments that concur questions in midair.
*
Ta-Nehisi Coates takes the title of his book, Betwixt the World and Me, from Richard Wright, and includes lines from Wright's poem before the book begins:
And one morn while in the woods I stumbled all of a sudden
upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks
and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves
between the world and me…
One tin can only imagine what the matter is that he comes upon, and we can make some inferences because historical context, merely whatsoever it is it stands out as a moment when the narrator encounters a reality in the world that impacts or changes him every bit an individual. The reference acts as a literal and metaphorical case for the investigation Coates conducts throughout the book: determining the nature and value of a self in the context of the historical and present world. He addresses the book to his son, every bit a way of showing the complex and dynamic nature of identity equally it is understood from within and every bit information technology is narrated from without. And he tells stories based in history and his own experience, to construct a narrative about the social structures within which the cocky exists. The story Coates tells about how his grandmother taught him to write is really a story well-nigh the power of writing to help 1 make sense of the earth:
She too taught me to write, by which I mean not but organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation. When I was in trouble at schoolhouse (which was quite oft) she would brand me write well-nigh it. The writing had to respond a series of questions: Why did I feel the need to talk at the same time as my teacher? Why did I not believe that my teacher was entitled to respect? How would I desire someone to conduct while I was talking? What would I do the next time I felt the urge to talk to my friends during a lesson? I have given you these aforementioned assignments. I gave them to you not because I thought they would curb your beliefs—they certainly did not curb mine—but because these were the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness. Your grandmother was non instruction me how to bear in grade. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the discipline that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing—myself.
Coates' enacts the idea that between the cocky and the world exists a continuous infinite of interrogation, negotiation, confrontation, learning, and writing. Writing is the affair between "the world and me" and through writing one can question, evaluate, and maybe fifty-fifty come to understand more about the world and ane's relationship to that.
Reading Multiply/Divide, I sometimes wonder if Walters assumes we know the historical details she references, or if she believes that nosotros are learning along with her, through her own way of interrogation? This isn't a criticism but it is to say that she invests a lot in her readers, trusting us to bring our knowledge and experience into the reading to learn along with her. For instance, in the essay, "Solitary in America," Walters delves into and pulls back away from history: slavery in general and her family history as it is descended from slaves. Walters also takes us through two parallel stories most graveyards. Starting time, she visits the cemetery in New Orleans—where earlier generations of her family were buried—to check on impairment from the floods and aftermath of Katrina. Minimal discussion of the pervasive structural racism that turned a hurricane into a contemporary human catastrophe for the city's poor and black leads to a visit to her flood damaged grandmother's house, and and so to the cemetery, to "make sure that our people hadn't floated away," she writes; "I took a walk around, and it looked like everybody was still tucked in tight" (8-nine). Nosotros then follow her to New England, where she introduces us to the New England tour guide for the site of Pool Dock, a settlement founded in 1630, and writes that "many of wealthiest families in boondocks made their fortunes in "the trade" showtime by shipping food, lumber, livestock, and other appurtenances to British colonies in the W Indies and then past conveying captured Africans to the Caribbean, Virginia, and Portsmouth" (13); she adds that Charles, the tour guide, "occasionally used the give-and-take "servant" just never the word "slave"" in reference to some of the Africans in New England during that time. Over following pages, she describes the history around that distinction, and that although there were in fact many African slaves in New England, some New Englanders go on to refer to them equally domestic servants.
Walters takes us on a quest for more than information after hearing about bodies found nether an intersection in Portsmouth, New Hampshire believed to be of African ancestry and buried in the 1700s. The cemetery was originally on the outer edge of town, pushed bated, and then eventually built over and forgotten. While the narrator struggles to clear a process for having feelings about this history, at times condign numb instead of angry for example, she also offers detailed descriptions of some of the bodies, or parts of bodies, found under the intersection. These are powerful because we already know they have been ignored and forgotten; at that place are no headstones, no cemetery, and because the violence of the contemporary (like sewers and infrastructure) literally runs through the coffins and corpses….
The head of the female person person in Burial 6 was located under the sidewalk, which had to be caved in to allow for her removal. Only the upper portion of her coffin was constitute intact. Her lower legs, cut off where they intersected with a utility trench and a ceramic sewage pope installed around 1900, revealed evidence of a bone infection and severe inflammation of the shins. Her left arm appeared to be laid beyond her trunk, and her attic, at present missing the face, pointed to the right side of the coffin. Her upper cardinal incisors were shaved, possibly according to a West African cultural tradition, and stand for the earliest documented example of such dental modification in North America. (29)
This description, inserted inside a small list of descriptions of some of the remains found, does what the residue of this essay does: gives united states of america powerful item and then moves on to the next matter. The detail lingers for us, as readers, in a way that'southward both emotional and manageable. That is to say, the narrator brings united states in to her process of emotional connection, we encounter the traumatic and trigger-happy realities of history lingering in the present, and and then we have to procedure that a bit at a fourth dimension. In dealing with the layered complexities of African history in America, the surreal (what tin can't be fully comprehended) mingles with the real (physical evidence and undisputed history) and nosotros accept to spend fourth dimension recognizing where these alloy and divide. The combination of straightforward reflection on the facts gathered, and the glimpses into the narrator's anxiety almost how to feel and comprehend, engages us as readers to immerse ourselves and go along the journey. The subtle shifts in content and form from one piece to some other go along u.s. on our toes.
*
Ii "Manhattanville" essays—separated past six pieces that alternate betwixt the personal essay and fictional story—weave personal history, ecology justice, racial identity, and public housing history. The first Manhattanville essay begins, "The first time I was mistaken for my son's nanny, I did not criticize the offending woman's lack of imagination out loud" (57), and proceeds to reverberate on "ii-ness" in terms of her son'south identity (African American and Jewish) and in regard to other subjects, explored through scenes that depict walking through the complicated economic and social history of this part of New York City. Another example of a duality that is introduced in the first essay and explored farther in part two, is the pair of public housing complexes that seem to have created a culture in the neighborhood, the two complexes in competition, each offering a sense of identity for its residents. She likewise writes more about the history of public housing in NYC, showtime with mayor LaGuardia'southward program in 1934 to "create legislation for the first municipal housing authority in America." Mail service-Low poverty had risen and the mayor believed that the "slums" were "breeding grounds for social disorders" (161). Occasionally she makes pointed commentary, for example writing, "one strategy for dealing with poverty is to modify the weather that go far possible. Another way is to relocate the poor, and then those responsible for creating disparity do non have to face the consequences of it" (163). But this essay also weaves through the personal, and web of physical and historical metropolis context, without declarative statements. Maybe, she seems to say, in that location are not ever statements to be fabricated, and even when at that place are, what good exercise they do?
In these essays, there are layers of stories and emotions. In that location's rarely a thesis and support. Narratives circle around, draw attention to, motility away from, settle momentarily in other spaces, and leave us with new ways of perceiving. Through experience and investigation, Walters asks questions that bring us equally readers to invest in possible answers. We besides have to face up the reality of being complicit in the history of racial and economic marginalization and recognize how we participate in narratives that simplify contradictions as means to understand the world (white/blackness, rich/poor, etc.). And we go responsible to pay attention to the realities that show us multiple kinds of intersections and layers informed by history.
Multiply/Divide calls our attention to the complex simultaneities of the real and surreal. Although we every bit readers and consumers have learned how to construct ideas and information into easily digestible narratives and to trust the progress of commercialism, Walters shows us the value in becoming open to the fragments and questions, and sitting with those even when it feels hard to manage. Fifty-fifty while the construction of the new tells us progress is good we learn that we accept to swoop further in to the long version of the story, and spend fourth dimension there, in order to know more than. Or as Walters writes, "when all around me the big pieces proceed moving, I have trouble knowing if what I come across is existent. Am I part of this place or just an observer? Do I play a part in its history, or volition I fail to leave whatsoever significant marking? Nigh likely the latter is true, though my ego makes me want to believe otherwise" (173-four).
There may be no definitive answers, but similar our existent lives in the world, the questions are layered, intertextual, subject to always shifting contexts. That'due south not to say a self can't be grounded, or clear in her sense of identity and politics in the world, merely that these are dynamic, complex, and more than than unmarried narrative versions repeated verbatim. And like the city's history of race, housing, and new construction eliding the erstwhile, narratives happen over time and across space, in pieces and fragments, not e'er "neatly" or homogeneously. Ofttimes, shiny new drinking glass buildings stand straight upward against the old: cute and historic, or abased and aging. The real and surreal always in an intricate dance.
Jill Darling has an MFA in creative writing and a Ph.D. in twentieth century literature and cultural studies, and is the author of (re)iteration(southward) (Spuyten Duyvil),a geography of syntax (Lavender Ink), Solve For (BlazeVOX, ebooks),begin with may: a series of moments (Finishing Line), and two collaborative chapbooks with Laura Wetherington and Hannah Ensor: at the intersection of 3, and The First Steps are the Deepest. Her disquisitional poetics essays tin be found in How2, Something on Paper, Ethos Review, and in The Quint. Darling teaches writing at The University of Michigan-Dearborn.
Shiny New Up Confronting the Old: Wendy South. Walters' Surreal Reality in Multiply/Divide was terminal modified: December 27th, 2017 by
Source: https://entropymag.org/shiny-new-up-against-the-old-wendy-s-walters-surreal-reality-in-multiply-divide/
0 Response to "Read Lonely in America by Wendy Walters"
Post a Comment