So, I did it again. Worked on a draft for the last couple of days and lost it. I changed the presentation of the blog to make it easier to read and when I came back – the draft was gone. The thing is the thoughts that don’t gel right away, the ones that are worth returning to, that make me search for direction or meaning or a way to uncover a blind spot I know is there but can’t quite locate – those are the ones that teach me something. I look at my thought process from a day or a week’s distance and see things that I didn’t notice before, missing pieces, links or connections. And sometimes rereading my written words provides an insight that just thinking about an idea doesn’t. Certain words resonate. I see that I used a passive voice instead of a sure declaration. Why? I find connections on different levels and see that maybe what I’m writing about is not at all what I thought I was writing about.
The draft contained a knotted bunch of strings, some that have their origin years ago in my past.
Last Friday a friend and I attended an event on the lawn of the Charles Wright Museum of African American History. A tribute to Gil Scott Heron was what had induced me to suggest the outing. Before we left, Val asked me if I thought it was going to be weird being the token whites there. I hadn’t thought about it much but really didn’t expect to be the ONLY white people there. And we weren’t. There was a little blond boy of about six years old who danced his way among the crowd of people on their lawn chairs and blankets.
I didn’t feel weird being there. The weird thing was that no one else seemed to think it was weird that we were there. I did feel uncomfortable though a couple of times, especially during the song “Niggers are Scared of Revolution”. This was one of the nods to Gil Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” taking it to the next level, so to speak. Val had wanted to shoot some photos down by the stage so we left our spot on the periphery and made our way up front so she could get close to The Last Poets, who were performing. On many levels I understood the song and responded to the rhythm of the drums, the urgency, the passion of the words, the humor, the pathos. I understand false bravado and fucking up. I even related to the desire of the last stanza that tries to distinguish all the things people do to survive in this world from the one thing that shrivels a sense of self, the fear of change, of hiding in the safety of accepted norms. But I was an outsider here. As much as I could relate to some of the ideas Hassan was singing about, he wasn’t singing to me or about me or my experience. And I felt a little like a voyeur peeking in on somebody’s private moment. On the one hand, I wanted to participate in the music and poetry but on the other hand, I was questioning just why I was there.
Why, why, why. Needing to have a reason, a justification for what I do, has stopped me from pursuing things I enjoy. This is one of the strings that I’m trying to tease out of the knot that was contained in the lost draft. Why do I need a reason except that I like it?
Another string is the link to Gil Scott Heron. I had forgotten that in the first car I owned I nearly wore out my Gil Scott Heron cassette tape, playing it over and over again, not really listening to the words so much for meaning as for the affect they produced. And, eventually, being unable to say why I liked it so much, giving it up for something that made more sense (or so I thought) in my life. Afraid of being a poser (before that term even existed I think) but not even knowing what I might be trying to pose as – hip, rebellious, edgy?
Another string that leads from that knot into my present life in white suburban Detroit, a phrase heard a few times in the last several months: “The neighborhood is turning.” I think this refers to racial demographics as in “Our neighborhood is turning from overwhelmingly white to ‘mixed’” but I haven’t had the guts or motivation yet to ask exactly what a speaker means when he or she says this. Maybe it’s the rise in “for sale signs” as a percentage of the ratio of lawns that have them to lawns that don’t as in “My daily walk is turning into an education in just how many real estate companies there are.” And this string is entwined with another that has wended through time: the memory of my childhood neighborhood in Detroit blooming with “for sale” signs and its subsequent deterioration.
So many ways to pull on these strings, pulling them apart or pulling them into a tighter knot. I mostly welcome the change in my neighborhood and I don’t know why. I could say it’s because I think it’s good for my family to live in a diverse neighborhood that better reflects the world etc…but that’s only a small part of the reason. If that had been a big enough consideration I wouldn’t have moved here in the first place. And while I can envision myself saying “I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the neighborhood is ‘turning’” I chose not to discuss my experience at the Charles Wright Museum last weekend with several of my white family and friends because I didn’t know how to explain why I would want to do that, how to justify my choices. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do right now.
In a way, I think I’m trying to justify writing too. Do the reasons matter?
