the KIS.list

Vol. 60, Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

noreply@blogger.com (Kiini) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:13:00 +0000

Tribeca Film Festival
New York, NY

There are certain elements of the human experience that define our awareness. These “accidents” of birth hold immense power over our beliefs, understandings, and interests. Some of the factors that define us, like gender, are genetically determined. Others, like poverty, are determined by sociology and family membership. Still others, like physical ability, are determined by an array of circumstances ranging from external causes (such as medical, automotive, or chemical accident) or happenstance (such as the unfortunate formation of oddly-functioning genes). All of these factors create unique—virtually unrelatable—experiences that are specific to one particular group. No matter how loudly these groups yell about their experience, they are often unable to communicate their struggles to those who don't share the same traits.

For whatever reason, humanity has made race one of those damningly determining factors of human experience.

Racial and ethnic identity is determined and defined in many different ways across the globe. Wherever it is encountered, it manages to stir up profound incidents of inequality, suffering, discrimination, and self hatred. A Bob Marley song lyric states that identity-based squabbles and murderous race wars will die down when “the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes.” Yet, among people of the same color skin, the color of the eyes does manage to hold significance. We are, it seems, hierarchical beings, seeking from childhood to name ourselves as the best, the smartest, the fastest, often at the expense of whichever person stands out as different. Whether it’s a group of blonde haired women on reality tv kicking the brown-haired, brown-eyed women of their own race off the show, or a kinky haired traveler being singled out for sexual harassment by people who share her skin-color, race and its attendant physical manifestations are the focal point of some of humanity’s most predatory activities.

The fact that the act of discrimination itself is interpreted as a show of power reveals the disturbingly feral roots of human behavior. In many societies’ eyes, to be discriminated against is to be put down, debased, or shamed. The shame of discrimination is so pervasive that the values of those who discriminate infect the psyche of those who are discriminated against. It is not only the bigot who believes that certain groups are “less than, ” those certain groups often end up identifying themselves as less than. When there are massively obvious societal inequalities, the person on the bottom can’t help but ask, “Why me?—Why others who look like me?”

If all this sounds like a mouthful of marbles, let me speak more plainly. I recently went to see the very excellent documentary Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans. The New Orleans Tribune called Faubourg Tremé “flat out brilliant” for its “storytelling, filmmaking and testifying. ” The film brilliantly provides hard-nosed history, archival footage and factual information within the parameters of a moving, gratifying documentary experience. The filmmakers (a duo that crosses racial and gender lines) manage, in a very engaging way, to relate significant elements of American history—specifically pre-Civil War to post-Reconstruction—without making anyone’s eyes glaze over.

Americans have long been accused of having short attention spans. As such, we often take a very fragmented view of history. The Civil War over here, the Civil Rights movement over there, and Hurricane Katrina in yet another space. The narrative of Faubourg Tremé takes a huge needle and weaves together a linear storyline from the very earliest moments of the black presence in the city of New Orleans to the contemporary post-Katrina reality. (For a thorough write-up, visit: http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0213&s=)

For me Faubourg Tremé was an emotional experience that was damning as well as enlightening. The documentary uses wonderful archival resources to reveal the history of civil rights struggle going way back before the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement is widely regarded as the first major push for people of color to gain the full benefit of American citizenship. So naturally, if I told you the film dissected a case of national significance regarding a person of color integrating the public transportation system, what time period would you think of? If I told you that the film documented a time when people of color held governmental positions in record numbers, what era would you think that happened in?

Faubourg Tremé is about so many things: the restoration of an old house, the stories our neighbors have to tell, the history of a culturally-rich New Orleans neighborhood, the history of resistance against discrimination, the fight for black American citizenship, the destruction of an interracial neighborhood, hurricane Katrina, jazz, the pain of losing your hometown, survival against incredible odds, and, very centrally, the second line: both the music and the dance. But the thread that stands out most to me, months after seeing the film, is the story of Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896.

I’ve always known Plessy v. Ferguson to be the case that upheld segregation. I knew that the Plessy v. Ferguson decision decreed that “separate but equal” facilities of all kinds are sanctioned under American law. What I have never bothered to remember is the details of the case. After seeing Faubourg Tremé, I will never forget. Plessy was a New Orleanian of mixed descent, a man who identified himself as black and looked white. Backed by an interracial coalition of concerned citizens, he entered a white car on public transportation in post-Reconstruction New Orleans. When he refused to move to the colored section, he was arrested and he (along with his backing coalition) took the case to court. Sound familiar?

The film’s statement about how deflating and damaging the Plessy v. Ferguson decision was to the residents of Treme was revelatory for me. People who had seen the tides of discrimination turn; people who had elected govorners and senators, who had held public office, bought land and opened businesses had just been told, by their government, that the time for equality was over. Black children would no longer be educated beyond early elementary school, there would be no more black politicians, businessmen would become sharecroppers, and blacks would have to sit in assigned areas on the trolleys.

There was an audible gasp in the film audience when these post-Reconstruction losses were delineated. Most of us—I assume—could not fathom the loss of liberties that black Americans weathered with the advent of Jim Crow. I suppose I’d always assumed we went straight from slavery to Jim Crow. I knew about Reconstruction, I knew we’d had governors and business owners, but it seemed like a blip on the screen of a story that ran contrary to liberty and equality. The film gave me a glimmer of understanding of what it might feel like to believe, fervently, that my nation had a real intention of equality. To believe that the lynchings and the resegregation around me was a localized—rather than governmentally sanctioned—discrimination. Having already desegregated the transportation system once before (back when public transportation was horses and buggies), these fighters for liberty took the Plessy v. Ferguson case to the Supreme Court because they believed they’d be supported by the laws of democracy. The decision of the Supreme Court showed them how wrong they were. With that one judgment, the Supreme Court gave federal authority to the proponents of Jim Crow and smothered the voices of everyone who protested the dissolution of equality.

The fact that the audience was shocked by this information shows the depth of our collective ignorance about the true history of black people in America. Envisioning Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement as the third desegregation of public transportation for the people of New Orleans brought me to a new understanding of the unspoken history/burden/uphill battle of black American citizenship. [Note: one reviewer of the film, read these historic details as defensiveness. He writes: “ ‘Almost a century before Rosa Parks,’ we’re told, the transit system of Faubourg Treme was desegregated, and while this is fascinating, it also serves to somehow dismiss Parks. The sense is that the filmmakers feel a good offense is a good defense, and they’re more than a little defensive.”]

For me, the narrative of Faubourg Tremé peels back so many layers of repressive falsehoods. I discovered, after the credits were rolling, that some of those repressive falsehoods are firmly lodged in my own psyche. The documentary features jubilant footage of second line parades (a tradition that may become a historical relic with the rate that New Orleans street musicians are being arrested for parading without a permit). As I watched the dancers buckjumping with abandon, I could see from the set of their faces and the glare in their eyes that many of them were damaged in spirit, survivors of hard hard lives. They were the type of people I judge as I return home to my working class neighborhood. Self-medicating people who are hanging on to life by a thread. Seeing them dance while hearing the story of Treme’s history put a completely different narrative to the question: What’s wrong with these people? Why can’t they get it together?

After the film, I remember a startling thought shooting across my brain. I thought, fortified by the history I had just been fed: “I am right! We are human. There’s nothing wrong with us.” The idea that I—a child who had been BRED to love black people from birth—was walking around feeling that there is a “wrongness” about black people troubled me. Not only because I don’t want to harbor such thoughts, but also because I wonder what other black people are thinking about us, about themselves. Those who have no uplifting chants that speak positively about race, who didn’t grow up with black dolls, who don’t have any positive role models in and around their lives. What do they feel about themselves, their history, their legacy, their place in this nation?

I saw the film sort of like a jazz funeral (a jazz funeral is featured in the film). In a jazz funeral, the walk to the burial ground is slow, plodding, heavy, sad. Then when the body is placed in the ground (or in the wall), the body is “cut loose” and the music becomes rousing, celebratory, and vibrant. The film ends with one Treme resident saying she believes the city, and the neighborhood, can come back from destruction. Her words are like a promise of rebirth and resurrection. Ending on that note made me feel as if all the history I had viewed, the struggles, the setbacks, the orchestrated obliteration of advances, was like the beginning of a jazz funeral: sad, and full of pain and sorrow; while the future is the moment in which the rousing celebration will begin. By ending on hope, the film seems to be wishing for a tomorrow of strength, of equality, of possibility, and of a continuing richness of culture.

Faubourg Tremé is widely relevant. It goes down smoothly and is very appealing. I think it has something important to say to students, teachers, parents, and American citizens. The filmmakers did a lot with this little documentary, subtle and intelligently presenting rich and important moments of American and New Orleanian history. The film is available for purchase (for individual use) and for leasing (for educational use) at www.tremedoc.com. Post-Katrina, it seems, people have new eyes and ears for what’s happening in the city of New Orleans—Faubourg Tremé is the story of what came before.

Be well, be love(d),

Kiini Ibura Salaam

Vol. 59, You Have So Much More Time Than You Realize

noreply@blogger.com (Kiini) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:48:00 +0000

Brooklyn, NY

We live in a culture that believes in diminishing returns. Everything, it is said, depreciates. When I’m caught up in this hysteria, I try to remember examples that contradict this belief. Fine wines, beloved talismans, inherited furniture, and friendships whose years of association add immeasurably to their value. There are many people around us, too, whose lives and careers show the possible richness of the passage of time. There is Isabel Allende who found true love at the age of 46. There’s Toni Morrison who published her first novel at the age of 39, and won her first major award 18 years later. These examples are comforting to me. They whisper, don’t stress the passage of time. Just because you don’t have the bird in the hand now, doesn’t mean there aren’t two in the bush getting ready to fly right at you.

Variations on the theme of easing artistic anxiety seem to be congregating around me of late. And, because I am constantly talking about the artistic process, I am as much a mirror for this conversation as a magnet. I find comfort in the lives of other artists, artists like Jeanne Betancourt, a writer I met in Oaxaca two years ago when she came to visit her grandchild. Her grandchild was an ebullient two-year-old whose energy and explosive inquisitiveness sometimes exhausted her parents. Through my friendship with the two-year-old’s parents—a couple from New York in whose amazing little villa-ish house I spent a few pleasurable afternoons—I got to know Jeanne. She shared stories and encouragement from her writing career as I struggled with my novel.

Fast forward to New York, 2008. Jeanne was hosting a birthday party for her granddaughter. When the swirl of children and candy and parents and cake had subsided, Jeanne sat next to me to ask about my life, specifically about my writing. I gave her my standard ambivalent response: “Oh it’s wandering out there lost, without me.” Jeanne put her hand over mine, looked me deep in the eyes and said, “You have more time than you realize.”

I love how people can be so many things to so many people. Jeanne is mother to the couple I befriended in Oaxaca, grandmother to the little girl whose expressiveness and green-eyed, chunky-cheeked beauty I reveled in, and experienced writer to me. Well-settled into her writing life, Jeanne is an older writer with more than one popular young adult series under her belt. She lives a wonderful life in a gorgeous apartment, shares a loving partnership with her mate, AND she paints too! I have no doubt that in the process of building this life, Jeanne learned a lot about time. Elder artists have an experiential awareness of time that we “younger” artists can only embrace on a conceptual level. The seasoning an artist undergoes as she completes a decade of artmaking, two decades of artmaking, three or more decades of artmaking is not quantifiable.

An interesting way to get an internal peek at the loping strides an artist may make over decades is at a retrospective. In the fall of 2007, the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) launched a retrospective of sculptor Richard Serra’s work. The exhibition spanned forty years of artmaking. Before I went to the show, I had no idea who Richard Serra was. I was enticed to attend by images of his large-scale work that were plastered all over the subway. The images were of intriguingly humongous metal sculptures that easily engulfed all human beings photographed near them. I went to the Serra show to see something that would wow me. A retrospective, however, is not just about the wow. It is also about yesterday. It’s about an artist’s roots, his beginnings, her awkward attempts, and, yes, ultimately about how the wow was reached.

Richard Serra’s early work was minimalist, spare, and, well, underwhelming. It didn’t have the air of finished art offered up for public consumption. Rather it felt like studies, gestures, experiments, a close conversation between the artist and his materials. Clearly Serra had meditated deeply on how he wanted to manage his medium. He had bent leather, cut wood, manipulated metal to make shapes and forms that satisfied his eye. Yet he seemed to draw his satisfaction, not from some external vision of what he wanted to present to the public eye, but from what the materials whispered to him in quiet, personal interactions. I imagine him, in those early years, finding raw material and cutting and molding until it reached a form that best expressed its essence.

With titles like “Belts,” “Doors,” “Remnant,” Serra’s early sculptures seemed to reject the concept of consciously “saying” something, of creating an intellectual meta-meaning to explain his artistic impulses. In fact, the early work was so bare bones, so without flourish that I can only describe them as anti-discussion pieces. Not that there was nothing to consider about them, but they refused to lend any fodder to any musings about meaning. They asserted their belt-ness, door-ness, or remnant-ness without need or desire for comment from the viewer.

Around 1969/70, Serra started to play with space. Like his earlier work, Serra’s “space” sculptures did not seem to reach toward expressing a particular concept or idea. Instead, he appeared to be experimenting with ways to define space. The pieces included in the retrospective from this time period were, for the most part, a lot of metal squares placed in various geometric arrangements. All the way up to the 80s, Serra seemed to be very intentionally playing with what particular placements of his metal squares could do to create and suggest openings and enclosures. In deciding what spaces would be boxed in and which would be left free, he was molding the air around his sculptures as much as he was handling solid materials. These pieces were, for the most part, waist high. They were objects to look at from the distance and considered. They could be walked around and even, leaned over, but not entered.

Then in the 90s something happened. The pieces grew to gargantuan proportions. Interaction with them no longer involved distance. You could no longer stand over a Richard Serra sculpture. The current form of the artist’s work towers over even the tallest human being. Their forms cut paths into space. They circle around themselves and their viewers, tilting dangerously. They are large enough to be entered and grand enough to limit the amount of sky exposed at any given time. They arch and sway to alter sound and make you question your sense of equilibrium.

I felt there was a stark difference between Serra’s contemporary works and those from the 70s, but the friend who went to the show with me disagreed. He made me look at those gestures and studies that I found dry and internal, and imagine them blown up to a massive scale. It is the same work, my museum buddy insisted, the same conversation amplified onto a much larger scale.

The contemporary Serra sculptures are downright delightful. They are awe-inspiring. You look for the seams and wonder how he got such massive pieces of metal to bend that way. You walk through and find yourself lost in a maze of metal. You hear the distortion of other’s voices and wonder if they are near or far. You linger just beyond the bend where the wall tilted just to hear the people behind you lose their balance, hold their heads and proclaim dizziness. And all this power and play and wonder grew from those plain unadorned gestures and studies of the preceding years, bare bones sculptural forms that I found just okay.

The instant we left the Serra show, I told my friend that Serra had just given me a valuable lesson. To see the leap Serra made—to know that he would not be altering space and time if he had not spent YEARS playing with waist-high metal squares—made me know one thing about artistic process and progress. It made me know that your process and progress cannot be predicted. You don’t know where you are headed as an artist. You can produce work that you consider to be just okay for twelve years and then all of a sudden tap into a reservoir of genius. Or you could wander in circles just hinting at magic, and never break open the walls. The point is you don’t know. If you judge yourself on your journey and silence your studies and gestures and attempts, you may never find out.

The Richard Serra show was like one huge mantra for me: be gentle with yourself, be gentle with yourself, be gentle with yourself. As artists we can judge ourselves mercilessly, harshly. Insult ourselves when we don’t measure up to our own notions of what art is. But what if you judge yourself into silence and you never reach that level of maturity when your work is beautiful and wonderful and terrible and powerful and everything you knew it could be.

So my writing is slumbering. So your music is snoring. So your sculpture is plodding. Yet and still, there is a tiny little seed within each sleeping writer and snoring musician and plodding artwork that—when left to sprout and root and grow—may one day become the tree of life. I take to heart Jeanne’s exhortation that I have more time than I realize. That my life and my art may unfold in ways that surprise and delight me. Another grandmother might put it another way. She might say: Baby, don’t trouble yourself. Cuz every goodbye ain’t gone and every shut eye ain’t sleep!

Be well. Be love(d).

Kiini Ibura Salaam

NOTE: The end of the year was a good time for sculpture at MOMA. The museum followed Richard Serra’s retrospective with a Martin Puryear show. Puryear is another sculptor that I didn’t know. And as I walked through the MOMA exhibition of his earthy, relevant, self assured, powerful work, I felt relieved. I felt reassured that there was someone out there creating art with heart and grace that was less about performance and more about impulse, strength, and beauty. I was enraptured and in love. The online images of the Puryear show can’t compare to the actual work, but they are worth a review. Puryear is a master!

Vol. 58, Achieving with Ease

noreply@blogger.com (Kiini) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:52:00 +0000

Brooklyn, NY

My daughter is five. There are a lot of concepts she can grasp now that were just beyond her reach when she was younger. So in the last week of December, I tried to explain the concept of the New Year. On December 31, I told her, “Today is the last day of 2007 and tomorrow will be 2008.” She knew I was going to a grown-up party to celebrate. She heard me calling friends and family, wishing them a happy 2008. I left the same voicemail so many times, that she got sick of hearing it. After my gagillionth time saying: Hi, I haven’t called you all year, but I’m just calling to say happy 2008, she said—in her pragmatic, know-it-all, matter-of-fact tone—Mom, nothing’s different.

And of course she’s right. A year is just a concept—just like a month, a week, an hour, a minute, and a second. These are all concepts that some human being created to manage this great stretch of awareness that is the human experience. These carefully calibrated concepts are sometimes the only thing that helps people to continue living. ‘This day will be over soon,’ they may soothe themselves by saying. ‘This year is a struggle, next year will be better,’ they may say consolingly in tough moments.

Metaphysical deconstructions of time notwithstanding, the New Year, for many, does mean something. Though from the point of view of a very smart five-year-old nothing has changed, a new year can bring a whiff of inspiration. It is a chance to start anew. To think differently. To adjust expectations and commitments. To hack out new paths and build new plans.

I, myself, embraced 2008 wholeheartedly. I didn’t verbalize any resolutions, but I found myself behaving differently. I would be standing in front of the elevator and suddenly say to myself, “It’s 2008, take the stairs.” In this first month of the year, I found myself spending quality time with two sets of friends I had neglected, doing some art, and actually (gasp!) writing. None of these things I planned to do, I just observed myself doing them.

Rather than try to figure out what these changes mean, I’ve decided instead to use them as a signal to embrace a new mantra. My one goal for 2008 is to achieve with ease. I plan to achieve an amazing level of productivity easefully—without stress, without extra elbow grease, without undue sacrifice.

Over the past two years, I have tussled with the concept of being a writer who isn’t currently writing. I spent almost all of 2006 and 2007 vacillating between constructing elaborate plans and concepts that would force me to write, and bemoaning the fact that I was not writing.

In 2006 I tried giving the dream back to God. I put on a brave face and said, “God, I’m no longer a writer.” I just didn’t feel the same pull to produce. I swore to God that if I never wrote again, I would be fine. “Give me another passion,” I went on to request. “It doesn’t have to be a grand sparkling dream; it doesn’t have to make me look brilliant or feel fabulous. I just want to be happy. I want a good life, and maybe a patio like the one we had in Oaxaca.”

In 2007, I started making public proclamations. I told anyone who would listen that I had exhausted the dream of being a writer. “It is beyond my control,” I told them when they stared at me as if pink bugs were oozing from my eyeballs. I tried to explain how this dream of being a writer had fueled me since college. How I went about my life with the absolute certainty that one day writing was all I’d be doing with my efforts and creative impulses. How that certainty allowed me to drift through life with a (relatively) unruffled brow, how it allowed me to accept the times that I wasn’t writing as just momentary lapses because my true writing future was out there waiting, beckoning even, for me to come closer. And how different I felt of late. How, in my quiet moments, there was no beckoning. There was just me, making complicated plans of how to continue being the writer I knew myself to be. There was just me, the person who was the writer, trying to push the person-who-was-no-longer-a-writer into being a writer again.

It made for very awkward moments when I had to introduce myself. No one within earshot would accept me omitting my writer identity from my introduction, but then when it had been introduced, people wanted to talk about it—the writing that did not exist—and wanted to know what I was currently writing—nothing—and generally wanted to meet her—the writer who no longer existed.

At a recent dinner celebrating the birthday of Keith Obadike, half of the brilliantly busy artist-duo BlackNetArt, I met a woman who was in an anthology with me. When I introduced myself—first name only—she said: Are you Kiini Ibura Salaam? And I said, “I am.” “You’re a real person?” she said. And it was as if I were talking to myself. Are you a real person? The writer you once knew has evaporated, does that mean you no longer exist? Does that mean the work you have done no longer talks to people? Does that mean that the work you have already written is suddenly mute and has nothing to say?

Ironically, I got my answer to that question months before this birthday dinner. At the end of 2007, I received an invitation to participate in an artist talk at the Brooklyn Museum, and I was absolutely shocked to have been invited. I suppose since I was estranged from the writer in myself, the last thing I expected was for the world to continue having a conversation with her.

In ensuing discussions with the organizer of the event, I discerned an important distinction. The value of art for the reader/viewer/watcher endures over time. However, for me as an artist, I value the work of artmaking. While it is the fruit of the labor that makes an artist in the public eye, it is the labor itself that makes me feel like an artist. Therefore, if I am not laboring as a writer—not in the process of writing and publishing—how could I be worthy of literary notice? How could I consider myself a writer?

Quickly and succinctly, the organizer of the event did away with my doubts as to whether or not I should claim the writing mantle. In explaining to me why she had requested my participation in the event, she said that the characters from one of my stories live with her almost daily. That is true for any work that moves us, it lives in the moment we engage with it and in all the moments we remember it. If any of the artists responsible for mesmerizing, powerful work stop creating, all the work they produced in the past remains. Just because they have stopped creating does not mean that the products of their artistic production just disappears.

I realize that there are many ways the term ‘artist’—or writer, in this case—can be defined. A writer is a person who wrote the text the reader reads. That writer is timeless. A writer is a person who commits her or his time to writing. That writer exists only in the present moment, and must recommit daily to writing. A writer is also a character, an image, an idea or a prototype that lives in each individual consciousness. As of the writing of this post, my idea of a writer—that illustrious, imaginary artist in my head—has met her demise.

What I did not understand until this New Year is that, in my last few years of active writing, I was no longer writing solely because I was compelled to write. I had begun to clutch on to my writing production as a passport into a beguiling future. I was writing my way into a literary Shangri-La that would save me from the monotony and drudgery of regular life. Every published piece brought me closer to my imagined tomorrow, a tomorrow in which ever word I uttered would be a beacon of brilliance ushering dispirited masses into transformation, rapture and enlightenment. ☺ This idea of writing, this ironclad certainty that everything I wrote would become a brick on my road to literary success was not fueled by the hard work of creating and editing and engaging with ideas. It was engaged by my very real need to believe in a charmed future—a tall, dark, and handsome stranger, if you will—that would exempt me from grappling with the mundane realities of life.

I have felt unmoored over the past few years, no longer knowing who I am in the absence of writing. I have lost that future vision of myself and been stricken with the fear that if I continue to not-write, I have failed to live up to my talent and my potential. Furiously churning out quality work was my insurance, my guarantee that I was stepping into a well-deserved, acclaim-rich, literary future.

After years of attempting to force myself to keep writing, I have come to the conclusion that my fantasy for my future was a bit overwrought. I still nurture the dream of fulfilling my talents as a writer but I no longer wear the dream like a name tag. I may or may not become—as I’ve always imagined I would—one of the most important writers of the 21st century. But I now know that being a writer is not the real fulfillment of my dream. The real fulfillment of my dream is to be a healthy, balanced, creative, and productive person. My one and only dream is to live a joyful present as I step into a joyful future. If I never write another word in my life (and clearly that’s not going to happen, because here I am writing to all of you), I will not have failed to live up to my potential. In fact, it is impossible for me to fail to live up to my possibility because who I am and everything I do is my possibility. As a non-writing writer, I can still go to conferences and sit on podiums and talk about my work. As an inactive author, I can present something I wrote five years ago. I don’t have to spend my life executing a five-point plan to become the writer I always knew I was meant to be; I just need to be the person I am.

The secret to achieving with ease is moving through life with no drag—no woulda-shoulda-coulda’s clinging to your ankles; no I’m-not-doing-it-right’s hanging around your neck; no I’ve-lost-my-mojo dripping from your breath. And certainly no gold-plated futures that make you feel crappy about all you’re not doing in the present. To achieve with ease you must say, I am okay with myself. I am enough, I’ve done enough, and everything I do from this point on will take me to where I need to go. So in 2008, I have a new credo for all my writer-selves (and for any of my fellow artists who may be grappling with the same issue). I say: all that you have done up until this point is complete in and of itself. It is not a precursor to what is to come. It is not a signal of great promise. It is, in and of itself, an oeuvre and it is enough. Whatever is yet to come is coming at its own pace in its own time.

(Exhale!)

The circle is complete. Happy 2008.

Be well. Be love(d).

Kiini Ibura Salaam

Vol. 57, The Cycle of Transformation

noreply@blogger.com (Kiini) — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 22:58:00 +0000

Removing the Veil
Brooklyn, NY

Last month I had the pleasure of catching Gilberto Gil in concert at Carnegie Hall. Now, Carnegie Hall has 2,804 seats. Gilberto Gil, in the August of his career strolls out to a full house and sits on a diamond shaped, raised platform surrounded by a glass of water, his guitar, and a back up guitar. That’s it: no back up singers, no back up vocalists, no lights, no drama. Him and his guitar.

I felt, as I felt when catching Lorna Simpson’s retrospective at the Whitney, how wonderful it is to be an artist who can devote their life to speaking in her or his own voice. More than the money or the fame (though I’ll take both in varying degrees), the ability to create, to spend a life creating, and then mount those creations to a public that gets it and appreciates it feels like a luxury to me. It is a luxury I want to experience in this lifetime.

Of course the external view of something is never quite like the internal view of something. Walking around dreaming about the day when you can have the whole floor of a museum to fill with whatever kind of art you want to create brings a veil of consciousness to the creative process that wedges between the artist and the art being created either blocking the art from coming to life or forcing a certain tone/approach to the work.

More than thinking about learning to write better or be a better artist, I’ve been meditating on how to get out of my own way. Just today I found my way on up-and-coming vocalist Alice Smith’s myspace page. She was ruminating on soul music and she said, referring to Björk, “the music there told me wow, that’s really her soul there. I thought about her a lot, about the sound of her music… well it isn’t exactly about the sound…. Her music made me contemplate her soul.”

On the one hand, it is about the sound. You have to figure out how to make sounds and how to put them together and how to record them and distribute them, but on the most profound level it isn’t about the sound; it’s about the soul bleeding through the sounds; it’s about putting the sounds in the service of the soul.

I thought about that when I heard the sounds coming out of Gilberto Gil’s throat. If you’ve ever heard Gil sing, that you know he likes to vocalize—his vocalizations are nothing like scatting, they are more like sighs and cries and bird sounds and creative little twists and turns of the voice that aren’t notes, at least not notes anyone would sit around and think of and write on a piece of paper to represent a certain emotion. At the concert I marveled at the sounds, some of them discordant and odd, and how they were just his special and particular way of expressing himself—it was Gilberto Gil’s soul coming out in sound.

So many of us artists come to the page or the canvas or the clay or the studio or the theater needing the art to be something, to do something for us, to be us, to prove that we are viable, fresh, creative, cutting-edge and sustainable. We need it to earn us money so we can come back to the page or the canvas or the clay the next day and the day after.

And yet, that need can start to define us and define our connection with the work.

Gilberto Gil is a prolific songwriter and poet. He has one song whose lyrics I am fascinated by. It’s a song that I couldn’t necessarily explain in words what it means, but the metaphor speaks volumes to me. The song is about a romantic relationship, but I feel like it’s about my and my relationship to art.

The lyrics work around the metaphor of the seed. He tells the woman he’s singing to: “Drão, our love is like a grain/A seed of illusion/It has to die to sprout. Once planted/Our hard seed resuscitates in the soil.”

I’m like an evangelist singing the gospel to my friends, my brilliant talented and tortured friends who are also not writing their novels or taking their pictures or making their shoes. Kill the romance, kill the ego, kill the high visions about what your particular brand of artistic genius will bring to the world. Kill what you think you’re creating about, and then just create. Let that dead seed of art resuscitate and water what sprouts and let it grow.

I have decided I’ve got to write this novel. And because my life is all about survival, I’ll do it like I’m surviving, not like it’s the above-mentioned luxury. I have taken a vow to work on my novel like I do the dishes; like I wash lettuce; like I feed my daughter; like I play computer games before bed (not like I’m fulfilling my destiny; not like I’m being brilliant; not like I’m solving a problem; not like I’m doing what I should). I’m vowing to write like I breathe.

Again, I turn to Gil’s “Drão,” in which he says, “Don’t think of separation/Don’t trouble your heart/True love is vast, it extends infinitely/It’s an immense monolith, it’s our architecture.” Except it’s not “true love” I’m thinking of as vast, it’s art and my ability to produce it. The great wellspring of creativity that is my very architecture, that I do not have to fear is not compelling enough or brilliant enough. It is what it is, and I need only plant it someplace and let it grow.

The road is anything but easy. Human beings are just so darn creative at creating difficulties, complications, blocks and obstacles. Part of the story we tell ourselves is that it needs to be brilliant when it comes out of us. In insisting on instant perfection we trample on the process, the flowering of our own art. We reason that we must know the end when we begin. We must see the brilliance, it must dazzle and perform. Forget all that madness, Gil’s lyrics sing to me. No the road is not easy, but the road need not be easy to be true. “Drão” acknowledges the pain, embraces transformation, praises the process, however hurtful it may be, because as Gilberto Gil figures it “if love is like a grain, then when it dies it is reborn as wheat and when it lives, it dies as bread.”

Be well. Be love(d).

Kiini Ibura Salaam

Vol. 56, Surviving by Percentages

noreply@blogger.com (Kiini) — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 18:38:00 +0000

Brooklyn, NY

It’s been a year since my last KIS.list posting.

Now, this doesn’t mean it’s been a year since I’ve thought about the KIS.list. I actually have a whole draft of a report on post-Katrina Mardi Gras, which I wrote last year after Mardi Gras 2006. I also have two incomplete posts—one on novel writing and another on poetry. But none of these attempts ever made it off my hard drive and into cyber circulation.

Every once in a while a friend confides that she is sure she’s been kicked off the KIS.list. “It’s been a long time since I received one, maybe you don’t want me on your list anymore,” friends will speculate. I assure them, that no one’s been kicked off the KIS.list. “It’s not you,” I tell them, “it’s me.”

And it is me. It’s me who hasn’t been able to convince herself to complete a KIS.list in the past year. And it’s also me who refuses to write a “Dear John” letter and call the whole thing off. If this were a romantic relationship, I would be the weakest link. The hot-and-cold lover who won’t call it quits, but won’t show up for dates either. A therapist would have a field day with this conversation.

As the divine order of the universe would have it, this impasse with the KIS.list is actually the perfect illustration of my current relationship with writing. When I try to describe this bizarre juncture in my career, I slip into double talk; I make a statement, then double back to contradict it. The point is: I’m a writer. I’m a writer like I’m a woman. I could stop wearing skirts, but that doesn’t change my anatomy. I have stopped writing reports, but that doesn’t change my identity. When I don’t write, I feel it. The KIS.list ideas back up in my mind, and I mope, mourning the loss of working in a special milieu—of being a writer writing about writing.

Yet, despite my love for writing, something strange has happened. Gone are the days when an idea was it’s own burning bullet compelling me to create. It seems as my talents as a writer grow, my emotional need to write shrinks. It’s like that nose dive in sex that some of my married friends complain about. Just when you can get it all the time, other things intrude on your interest in it. There are just too many things to be done. Introduce children, mortgage payments, and building nest eggs to the conversation and sex just shrinks and cowers in the corner. “Oh just get to me when you can,” she whispers, all forlorn and neglected. And of course, for some married couples, the prospect of having sex is just a gateway to the possibility of having more children and making more responsibilities.

So maybe I mistakenly married writing while I was being so prolific a few years back and now I just don't feel like “doing it” any more. I can't explain why I’ve lost my drive to write. I could moan and bellyache about my 9-to-5 sucking me dry, but I've done that before. Besides, I’m grateful for my job. I am grateful for the ability to come back from Mexico with $600 and no job, and start working within a month and pay myself back into the black with no major carnage. I could complain about parenting sucking me dry, but it’s such a lovely job. Parenting is as beautiful as it is difficult. I chose the job. It’s challenges might make me beg, cry, and hustle for a break, but I will never blame reduced artistic output on my daughter (even if my curriculum vitae documents the abysmal drop off in all literary activities since the year of my daughter’s birth).

So the question is, what to do? It is a question every artist must ask. When all the elements of my life are clamoring for my attention—the children and the bills and the sustenance desperately, fervently, tragically need my attention—how do I continue to create art?

I can’t lie. Before I had my daughter, the impassioned drive to write had already started crumbling. Before she was even an itch in her daddy’s pants, as the saying goes, I needed external triggers to lure myself into starting a new story. Back then, my trigger was an invitation; I swore to write a new story or essay anytime someone asked me to. At the beginning of the vow, the invitations flew fast and furious. But the less I wrote, the less I was invited to write. Over the past year, the invitations slowed to a mere trickle. Now I stand in a desert of production—no external triggers and no internal desires. I could die out here.

I will admit I ignored an invitation to write an essay last year, but when my friend Benjamin Rosenbaum invited me to contribute short shorts to a hyperlink web piece, I said yes. I swore that when the piece, “23 Small Disasters,” was posted on the web, I would write (and complete, and send out) a new KIS.list. (“23Small Disasters” is currently up on the Ideomancer site.)

The divine joke is that now that it is less of a struggle to write a fine piece of fiction, it is more of a challenge to simply sit down and write. While trying to figure out how to return my writer self to the world of the living, I came across an essay by Charles Derry entitled “A Year Like Any Other” in the September 2005 issue of The Sun magazine.

In the essay, Derry does an incredible job detailing and sharing his journey through cancer As Derry moves into a section about learning to see his cancer as a gift, he talks about his cousin Adriana, “the only cancer survivor in [his] family of victims. Diagnosed with a late-stage, inoperable lung tumor, Adriana had been given only a 2 percent chance of living five years. That was more than fifteen years ago. What was her secret?”

Adriana describes her secret as this: “If you want to live, you need to do everything you can to remain positive. I took ... what do you call it? Oh, right, astragalus and shark cartilage. I think that added 3 or 4 percent to my chances. I took it for five years; I went broke taking it, but that was OK.... And I ate. I ate no matter what. I figure maybe that gave me another 5 or 6 percent more. I ate because my son came back to force me to eat. Sometimes he put the spoon in my mouth. Even when my radiation and chemotherapy made me crawl on my stomach to the toilet and I was vomiting blood, I forced myself to keep eating, because I wanted to live. And sometimes, Chuckie, gee, I collapsed on that tile floor, I was so weak. But I continued to go to work. I figure that helped. And I spent time outside. And so, yeah, I tried to find my hope where I could. And prayer, too. And oh, Chuckie, I thought about your mother sometimes while I was sick, and especially about my dad, who just wasted away—and I think Aunt Frannie just wasted away like that, too and I thought, ‘No, I’m not going to die like that. I’m not going to.’ So that’s what I’d say to you: I’d say you got to make your own decision on what you got to do, and increase your percentages where you can, and hope for the best.”

So when a fellow speculative fiction writer invited me to start a writing group, and the little girl inside me made her ‘gag me with a spoon’ face, I called her anyway. I didn’t want to talk about writing. I told the woman, I didn’t want to work on writing techniques. In the face of my stubborn refusal, she made a brilliant suggestion. We could talk about our writing goals, she said. Then I heard the trill of trumpets announcing the arrival of the cavalry. A blinding light went off in my head (forgive me if I exaggerate, a little—my similies and metaphors have been penned up for quite a while). We made a date, invited a Ph.D. candidate who is working on her dissertation and got to work.

We set goals and hold each other accountable for keeping them. We work in percentages. We make small commitments and move forward by degrees. Since the group started I’ve submitted two stories for publication, applied for once fellowship and re-envisioned the second draft of my novel (and I'm here writing all of your today).

Gone are the days when writing defined me. Now I have to define writing. I have to pick up a really large and sharp knife and cut out a space for writing. Then I have to show up and play the numbers game. This year is all about throwing in the percentages, doing my small, scattered part to bring my writer self back from the edge of existence and putting her front and center, where she belongs.

Be well. Be love(d).

Kiini Ibura Salaam

Vol. 55, In New Orleans: Lower 9th Ward, Post Katrina

noreply@blogger.com (Kiini) — Thu, 11 May 2006 22:39:00 +0000

A Ghetto Where Figs Grew

The Ninth Ward is a notorious neighborhood in New Orleans. A Slate.com article about the Ninth Ward post Katrina characterizes it as "a historic black neighborhood, home to Fats Domino, abandoned by government, and the 'murder capital of the murder capital.'" The author, Frank Ethridge, called the Ninth Ward an "impoverished neighborhood [that] has long suffered from isolation and neglect." My siblings and I simply called it home.

We knew that it was impoverished. Yet every neighborhood, especially ghettos, has its own diversity—a diversity that outsiders can't see. We lived on 1708 Tennessee Street the first street at the foot of the Claiborne Bridge. I always felt our section of Tennessee Street was special. Unlike the rest of the Lower Nine, my street was lined with beautiful huge oak trees. Those giants of nature gave my block a certain charm. My ghetto in New York has very little to offer by way of nature, but in the Lower Nine we had acorns. The oak tree was host to huge circular fungus growths. There were flowered hedges and small purple plants next door. There was the small tree in our front lawn that seemed to sprout locust shells in the summer. After rooting themselves to the thin trunk, the locusts split themselves down the back and then escaped their shells.

We weren't people of the earth, so we didn't garden, but it wasn't for lack of space. In the back, we had just enough grass to call a yard. There were a variety of wild plants, including poison ivy and a flowering bush that sprouted red blooms that looked to be a cousin of the bird of paradise. These were the magical things that people couldn't see if they didn't live in the "impoverished neighborhood."

My grandfather also lived in the neighborhood. He had a proper garden along the side of his small brick house. He grew merliton, a fruit I've only encountered in New Orleans and outside of the U.S. (They're also known as chayote, xuxu, and chocho), My cousins lived on Flood Street on the other side of Claiborne Avenue. Their two-story house had so much land around it that it seemed to be its own little nation. Around the corner from our house, on Derbigny, my best friends had the branches of a huge fig tree hanging over their driveway. So the Lower Ninth Ward was a ghetto where figs grew.

When I was growing up, there was also financial diversity in the hood. We were middle of the road. We weren't hanging on by a thread, but we weren't redecorating either. There were those homes that looked way better than ours. And, there were those that were a few steps below the rest. We knew which way to walk to feel safe and which way to walk to peek at people who were barely holding it together.

Of course it wasn't all locusts and flowers, fungi and figs. There was the morning we woke to see a team of police in full riot gear with a battering ram running, military style, down the middle of the street. There was the lawnmower stolen from our shed, and when our grass grew unsightly our neighbors from two doors down—those we were almost certain had stolen it—came over and offered to cut our grass for pay. There was the time my parents were out of town and their little back apartment was broken into. The chaotic ransacking of their belongs told it all. "Crack" I whispered to my sister, and we shut the door feeling too frightened to face it ourselves.

There was Ace liquor store with its drunks hanging out front and its syringes and crack pipes for sale behind the glass partition. And many was the day that a child came in to buy a grandparent some beer and cigarettes. There was my first "boyfriend" who was rumored to be so emotionally disturbed that he tied firecrackers to dogs for fun. There was my childhood crush, a pretty boy who was a wasted away crackhead by the time I was on my way out of the city. There were the ex-friends who went to jail and those who just never went anywhere—time dragging down on their faces, weight accumulated the longer they stayed rooted on the same porches.

A Neighborhood, Not a Housing Project (A Tangent)

It's no secret that New Orleans is—and always has been—a deeply segregated city. On top of racial segregation, the class segregation is crippling. The difference between living in an impoverished neighborhood and a housing project seemed immense to me growing up. (A huge part of that difference came from my parent's outlook. We were 'in' the Ninth Ward, but not 'of ' it.) We had streets to wander around, rather than courtyards to navigate. We had cars driving in front of our house. We lived in a house that had windows on all four sides, rather than a cement and brick box, closed off on three sides.

There are no housing projects in the Lower Nine. The closest housing project to us is the Desire—one of New Orleans' hugest public housing developments. Throughout my childhood the Desire was an immense landmark. Driving by the dark brick structures with tiny windows meant we were close to home.

All of the housing projects were probably islands of poverty, but quite a few—the Iberville, the Magnolia, the Melpomene, the St. Bernard, the Calliope, the St. Thomas—were located across the street from neighborhoods. It always seemed to me that the Desire was its own neighborhood, located near nothing. Perhaps on the other end it spilled into a neighborhood and was accessible by bus, but when we drove past it looked like another country.

Even before I left home 15 years ago there were rumors that "they" were going to "do something" with the Desire. Over the years as we drove by, we started to notice empty units and boarded up windows. Soon it was obvious that whatever they were going to do to the Desire was being done all over the city. Fewer lights could be spotted in all the public housing developments around New Orleans. It was hard to argue with the removal of poor families from isolated brick structures with tiny windows. However the resounding question was, where were all the families who used to call these projects home?

Fast forward to February 2006. It had been a year since I had been home, I don't have much reason to go to the Ninth Ward anymore. I don't know how many years it had been since I had driven past the Desire. This time, I didn't recognize it. Gone were the two-level dark brick buildings. The projects had been dense. What stands in their place are clusters of well-spaced out pastel-colored houses that remind me of old New Orleans, Storyville perhaps.

I saw the same transformation uptown on the land that once was the St. Thomas housing project.

A recent article by Adam Nossiter explains: the new River Gardens housing complex "planted New Orleans-style homes — Creole cottages, for example, and camelbacks, a local version of a split-level — on the site of one of the city's worst housing projects, St. Thomas, now demolished. The new development was completed not long before the storm, but hardly shows wear. Though derided by some critics outside New Orleans as a tasteless pastiche, River Gardens replaced a sprawling, dangerous complex that was a deathtrap to many of its residents. Gunfire could be heard nightly in the project's environs, which had one of the highest murder rates in the city."

These new complexes are now mixed income, meaning a number of low-income families must seek housing elsewhere. Ironically, Katrina helped with the relocation process. Many of the people who lived there may not find their way back to the city any time soon—if ever. And those who have found their way back to their old stomping grounds have found that the rules have changed. Nossiter states: "Officials later said some residents had had difficulty adapting to the new development's requirements, and indeed one woman, Sharese Jones, complained that she was 'being evicted from here because of a TV' that she had kept on all night. 'Everybody who's back here, who's low income,' Ms. Jones said, 'is being picked on.'"

Three Ways In, One Way Out

Frank Ethridge's Slate.com article notes that the Lower Nine is "bounded by water on three sides—the Industrial Canal to the west, Bayou Bienvenue to the east and the Mississippi River to the south." Consequently getting to the Lower Nine means crossing on of three bridges—each of which has its own character.

The Florida Bridge is the smallest bridge used to access the Lower Ninth Ward. In my childhood, crossing over the Florida might yield a view of a horse or two as the cowboys who lived in the Lower Ninth Ward sometimes left their horses to graze on the land near Florida Avenue. I'm sure Katrina was not kind to the Florida Bridge. The bridge is an old style steel bridge that hinges open when any river traffic came by. Because the bridge sits close to the water, it was very vulnerable the swelling waters of the Industrial Canal.

About 20 blocks south of the Florida Bridge is the St. Claude Avenue Bridge. The St. Claude Bridge is like the big brother of the Florida. The St. Claude Bridge was exactly the same style, but it had two lanes instead of one and was built on higher ground. On the "upper" side of the St. Claude Bridge was the Post Office, a seafood store where we sometimes bought bags of boiled shrimp and crawfish for dinner and the Heartbeats Life Center. Heartbeats was my uncle's cardiology clinic for low-income (often elderly) residents of the Ninth Ward. My uncle ran the clinic from my childhood up until Katrina hit. Inside the clinic millions of dollars in medical equipment—expensive machinery that makes life-saving diagnoses—were lost. The clinic, like most of the Lower Ninth Ward sits quiet and stilled.

The St. Claude Avenue Bridge is situated right before the Industrial Canal bends into the Mississippi River. The levee on the south side of the St. Claude Bridge is almost picturesque. The wide expanse of grass on the dry side of the levee drew many runners, families, pets, and couples. The profile of residents was a little different near the St. Claude Bridge. Sprinkled among the working class African American residents of the Lower Ninth Ward are the offspring of the Ninth Ward's first residents. As noted in the Salon.com "Populated for its first century with working-class Irish, Italian and German immigrants, the racial makeup of the Lower Ninth Ward changed dramatically following the failed integration of Frantz Elementary. Rather than send their children to school with little Ruby, white families responded in droves to St. Bernard Parish president and land baron Leander Perez's invitation to white Lower Ninth Ward residents to move to the neighboring parish on the promise of all-white schools and neighborhoods."

Those white residents who did not leave the Lower Ninth Ward called their neighborhood Holy Cross. This is a prideful distinction to clarify that they (like us, I suppose) were 'in' it, but not 'of' it. The draw of Holy Cross was a handful of large, beautiful picturesque houses that excited preservationists and a majority white private high school in the middle of a black neighborhood.

We used to joke that if anybody wanted to trap us in the Lower Ninth Ward all they'd have to do is raise the bridges. In that case, we'd only have one exit: St. Bernard Parish. St. Bernard Parish lies to the East of the Lower Ninth Ward. We frequently went to St. Bernard Parish for pizza, to go to the movies, shop at WalMart or to have frozen yogurt. We went there for the services that weren't available in our neighborhood and then we left. We weren't welcome there. They tolerated us and took our money, but they weren't offering any permanent invitations.

It was not suggested that young black boys go into Chalmette alone. The residents may not like it, nor would the police. Sometime after I left the city, my young cousin didn't heed the warnings. He and his friends walked over to Chalmette. A police car drifted by once or twice keeping surveillance. Then the car stopped and demanded to know what the boys were doing. My cousin, unfamiliar with the police, gulped in fear thereby swallowing his gum. One of the police officers—convinced he was swallowing crack or some other incriminating evidence—grabbed him by the neck and wrestled him to the ground. He and his friends were taken to the police station to be locked up. Either my grandmother or my uncle's connections got them out. In New Orleans it's all about who you know.

The last bridge—our bridge—is the Claiborne Bridge. Our bridge rests between the Florida Bridge and the St. Claude Bridge. A wonder of engineering, the Claiborne Bridge towers over the other two. The tall, industrial structure of the Claiborne Bridge allows it to coolly stay put while river traffic passes beneath it. The Claiborne Bridge only has to disturb its peaceful existence when truly massive boats needed to pass through. Even then, the Claiborne Bridge doesn't deign to hinge one side up into the sky. Instead, the whole bridge lifts horizontally, refusing to disturb its equilibrium.

The levee on our side of the Lower Nine was not picturesque. It was not a place to relax and meditate on the motion of the water. It was a place to pass through on your way to somewhere better. The non-existent human traffic on the levee near our house made it the perfect breeding place for nutria rats—huge swamp rats. Neighborhood boys would go sport with the nutria rats for fun and sometimes, laughingly deliver them to the front gate of a girl's house to watch her face contort in disgust.

"Neighborhood? What Neighborhood? It's Gone Man."

Driving into the Ninth Ward across the Claiborne Bridge affords a nice panorama of my neighborhood. From the middle of the bridge, you can see the spread of houses from Tennessee Street all the way back to the levee. Before Katrina, it was only possible to see the Florida Avenue Bridge from the heights of the Claiborne Bridge. Once you came down from the bridge, all you would normally be able to see around you is houses. Since Katrina trampled through the Lower Ninth Ward, however, the landscape is decidedly different.

When my father drove me over the Claiborne Bridge and I looked over the spread of land that previously displayed a plethora of roofs, trees, and yards, the wind left my lungs. I did not see any roofs. I did not see any houses. I saw nothing—nothing, but rubble. Everything as far as the Florida Bridge had been flattened. What I was seeing put a picture to Michael Knight's comment as quoted in Salon.com: "Neighborhood? What neighborhood?" Knight asks incredulously about the future of the Lower Ninth Ward. "It's gone, man."

To say that the neighborhood—at least between Florida Avenue and Claiborne Avenue—is gone is no exaggeration, it is in fact an understatement. When we got to the bottom of the bridge, I looked left down Tennessee Street, my eyes popping at the lack of houses to obstruct my view. I looked right and there was no Tennessee Street. The houses on the right side of Claiborne Avenue had been shifted by the water and were now blocking off the right side of Tennessee Street.

When my father turned left onto Tennessee Street I had trouble making sense of what I was seeing. Random houses were standing at precarious angles, some shifted awkwardly onto the sidewalk, others rammed backwards onto someone else's property. Then my father drove onto the second block of Tennessee Street—our block. On our block, everything was down. The brick house that stood in front of ours for all my childhood was gone. No foundations, no pile of bricks, just random, unidentifiable debris. Every structure for as far as the eye could see was down. I could see clear across my neighborhood to the Florida Bridge.

The levee breach was about three blocks from our house. The force of furious floodwaters swept through and took everything out. Due to some strange combination of construction and location, there were two houses standing on our block. One was the house on the corner of Tennessee and Derbigny. The other was the house second from the corner of Tennessee and Derbigny—our house. The corner house was twisted at an odd angle and 1708 Tennessee Street was off its foundations, nestled against the neighboring house.

Standing in a sea of debris, looking at two houses standing on the entire block gave new meaning to the Red Danger List. Yes, the house was in imminent danger of collapse. It is only pure chance that Katrina did not demolish it. The rest of the tour of the Lower 9th Ward yielded similar visuals with varying degrees of damage. Tourists were wandering around on foot, residents and curious onlookers were cruising through in cars. The neighborhood that had never been on anyone's must-see list was finally being seen, but only after it had been violently and abruptly strangled to death. Sort of like the post-humous fame of a misunderstood and deranged artist, the Ninth Ward is suddenly sordidly and magnetically attractive. (To see a few recent photographs of the Lower 9, scroll to the bottom of my brother's Mardi Gras Day blog)

On a second visit to the Lower Nine, I saw a young black man sitting on a pile of debris while being professionally photographed. I saw a well-coiffed older white woman cruising by in a luxury car. I saw a press conference or community meeting of Common Ground, a volunteer organization that has been gutting houses, providing primary health care, relief supplies, and recently a mass action when they broke into Martin Luther King Elementary School and did clean up work. We ran into Spike Lee's crew being escorted by police. We watched reporters and journalists of every stripe take notes, shoot, film, interview, and document Katrina's aftermath.

I didn't realize how overwhelmed I was by the whole scene until a group with cameras told me I couldn't drive through a street on my way to see a family member's home. I swallowed my protest, drove onto someone's bulldozed property and turned around. When I approached the house from another angle, the same group tried to stop me from passing. Anger bubbled in my throat. I refused to stop. I inched the car forward little by little deciding I wouldn't stop until I was right upon the man with the outstretched hands. Suddenly, he stepped to the side and motioned me through. I don't know if it was my insistence or if his press moment had ended, but I was shaken by the time I drove past.

I felt somehow, that I belonged there. That I had a right to visit these homes because they had been part of the fabric of my childhood. Yet, none of my family currently lived in the Lower Ninth Ward. Through death, mobility, and the coming-of-age of children, we all had left at one point or another. (I just thought of one person—a cousin's grandmother—who was, in all probability, still living down there). I had not only left the Lower Ninth Ward, I had left the entire city in 1990 when I graduated from high school. With the exception of a five-month stint, I have not lived in the city since. I had no more right to be touring the Lower Ninth Ward than anyone else, and yet my anger was there. I was angry at being barred from my memories, blocked from communing with the remnants of my childhood. My brother had his own response to the destruction of our childhood home.

Here's Four Months, Now Save Yourself

In January, thousands of people were baited by an announcement that a mayoral panel was advising the mayor to create a policy that would shrink the "city's footprint." The panel suggested making New Orleans residents in the "hardest hit areas ... prove viability." Meaning if you want your part of the city to survive, get your ass down here and save it.

As Frank Donze and Gordon Russell reported:

"Residents of New Orleans areas hardest-hit by Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters would have four months to prove they can bring their neighborhoods back to life or face the prospect of having to sell out to a new and powerful redevelopment authority under a plan to be released today by a key panel of Mayor Ray Nagin's rebuilding commission."

Apparently a storm blowing through your neighborhood, destroying your life, swallowing up your mementos, and drowning your home is not enough to prove you need help from your government. In light of 4-month notices, the Red Danger List's statement that no timeline has been set for removal of properties in imminent danger of collapse becomes cruel. The government is dragging their feet in deciding what parts of the city will be saved and which won't. The statement that no timeline has been set for removal of debris suggests that there will be nothing done in the Lower Ninth Ward for a long, long, long time.

The insane 4-month plan was a catch-22 of the worst proportions. If there will be no removal of debris, how can people prove viability of their neighborhoods? In a neighborhood overrun with debris, there is no way even the boldest self-starter could raise their house up from the demolition. It's going to take massive amounts of capital to restore the city's architecture and infrastructure.

Days after my tour, I watched an episode of Oprah in which she was giving away residences to displaced New Orleanians. She filmed them going home to view their destroyed homes and finding one or two mementoes they could save. Then she filmed them walking into their beautiful new homes in a complex she built especially for Katrina survivors. Oprah has been extremely generous. She continues her support of the city by providing shelter to people who are bewildered as to how to begin again. Yet I couldn't quell a niggling though that kept worming its way around my brain. Why build a complex in Texas? I thought. Why not rebuild in New Orleans?

I began to wonder about the celebrities. Those who had put so much into search and rescue and donated millions to the Red Cross. Those who continue to provide housing all over the country. I wondered if any of them were putting money into the city. When I look at the scope of the destruction it seems that only someone like Oprah could raise these neighborhoods again. Who else could fund the clean up of debris, clean out of houses, demolition and/or gutting, and rebuilding? Who is going to decide that New Orleans is worth a new breath of life? Is this the end?

My older brother assured me that it only makes sense to help survivors outside of the city. When it comes to pouring money into the city, the watchwords are "be conservative." There are too many questionable variables. The next hurricane season is upon us. Will the city escape unscathed? The candidates for the mayoral race have just been selected. Mayor Nagin faces a fierce battle with Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu. Who will win? And the government is dragging their feet in deciding who they are going to help and who they aren't. So many New Orleanians want to come back but they don't know if their neighborhoods will be among those selected for renewal. What if they rebuild their houses and then get the announcement that their neighborhood won't be rebuilt?

Survive, Or Die Trying

At various houses in the Lower Ninth Ward, some homeowners have put up signs proclaiming that they intend to rebuild, lobbying against demolishing the neighborhood. For many who survived the floodwaters, the fight to survive continues. Organizations like Acorn has been circulating around the Lower Ninth Ward gutting houses, but also organizing to put pressure on the system to save the neighborhood.

Close to the St. Claude Bridge, in the bend of the levee, many houses fared much better than those on Tennessee Street. But one house stands out, because it (unlike its neighbors) is just a pile of wood and personal belongings lying flat on the ground. It is the home of Chandra and Keith McCormick—a couple who has been photographing New Orleans, as well as rural Louisiana, since I was a baby. They're in Texas wondering if they will move to Los Angeles or New York. Neither is quite right for them. Meanwhile, Keith is devoting himself to saving his and his wife's pictographic history of New Orleans people and culture. As soon as they could get to their archives, the McCormicks froze their negatives. Now Keith is restoring those negatives one by one. It is a massively expensive undertaking, he explains. It takes a whole day to restore one negative. But he is doggedly working through their archives. Their work was important before the storm. But now, their work is a precious document of pre-Katrina New Orleans. While officials dither around discussing the future of so many people's lives, New Orleanians across the nation are remembering their past—a unique manifestation of human culture that they may never see again.

Be well. Be love(d).

Kiini Ibura Salaam

P.S. I couldn't resist one more link. This site features an amazing short documentary on Katrina entitled: New Orleans: My Home, My Life, My Love.

Vol. 54, In New Orleans: Going Home, Post Katrina

noreply@blogger.com (Kiini) — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 00:04:00 +0000

Before returning home to New Orleans in February, I had a marginal understanding of what it meant for New Orleanians who had been forced to evacuate due to Katrina to go home and rebuild. I understood it would be hard, but exactly what rebuilding entailed, I could not grasp the depth of the task. I had heard the city was not up to speed. Although excessive numbers of people were living in the inhabitable areas, many stores were not open and many services were not available. I read an email that said most of the white (refrigerators and other home appliances) trash had been recovered. I read comments about the state of affairs on my family's email group. I heard about the process of de-molding the furniture my aunts and uncles salvaged from my grandmother's apartment. A process that included cleaning with bleach, leaving out in the sun, and cleaning a second time. I heard about the arguments and emotional meltdowns between some family members; I heard about the amazing unity and teamwork of others.

I received notice that my childhood home on 1708 Tennessee Street in the Lower 9th Ward was on the Red Danger List. What that means is the old Salaam home is one of more than 5,000 properties deemed 'in imminent danger of collapse' and recommended for demolition. However: "No timeline has been set for removal." What it would mean that my childhood home was to be demolished and that no timeline had been set for removal was unclear to me. I would not really understand what it meant until I returned home.

Returning home had a double thrust for me. I was not chased out of my home by Katrina, yet 90% of my immediate family had been. I felt coming home to see the city was something I HAD to do. I wanted to be as close as possible to this experience that had defined the last 6 months of my family's life (and will continue to dominate their lives indefinitely). In addition, after a year in Mexico, I was coming home to my family. My grandmother was turning 80, we had festivities planned. Our annual cook-off was scheduled. All 4 of my siblings would be in town. I would see my father. My daughter would get to play with cousins she only sees once a year. All of this to say, although I was en-route to see a city in destruction, I was also bent on celebration. Joining with my family is the fuel that keeps me going. They are some of the most amazing and inspiring individuals I know. I was going to be among those with whom I belong.

Of course, once you start talking about Katrina, it's something that gets stuck in the throat—like whatever airborne contagions are causing the Katrina cough. From the moment we were waiting to board the plane to New Orleans in Houston, everyone was talking about Katrina. In the streets of post-Katrina New Orleans, the stories of survival, befuddlement and exhaustion are thick and numerous like the missing residents. People in New Orleans love to talk and tell stories anyway. At the bus stop you're liable to find out any random personal detail while waiting for the slow moving transportation. So we heard them, the stories. In the airport, at the grocery store, in our family's living rooms. We heard about the would-be homeowners who can't find an insurer to cover newly purchased New Orleans property. We heard about the Katrina survivor who was finally paid out by his insurers only to have his home hit by a tornado—a tornado! Everyone wanted to know how everyone else made out. Where's your family? You coming back? You got money from your insurance? You got FEMA money? (In fact, my sister-in-law told me about a song that's been playing on the radio called "What Is Your FEMA Number?" making light of the disturbing reality that the majority of New Orleanians are on some type of relief.)

The precarious state of the city was obvious immediately. First in odd little details—houses missing necessary roofing, trees oddly bereft of leaves, the double "s's" on the ever popular "Double Happiness" restaurant on Carrolton Ave, stretched out and twisted at an odd angle. Then I noticed larger strokes. The dirt-brown, waist-high water-lines staining the sides of buildings where the water had soaked in. Stores with windows broken, posts tilted and knocked over, with hand-drawn banners that said "Now Open." Blocks and blocks of business empty and closed to patronage.

Even with all this destruction, the thing that most deeply symbolized how hard the city had been hit (and how far the city is from full recovery) is the fact that streetlights at many major (and minor) intersections are not working. Drivers have to use their own discretion and treat the dead stoplights as 4-way stop signs. The city has gone to the trouble to place stop signs at some of the intersections. Many of the stop signs are simply propped at the base of the stoplights. I realize failed streetlights are the least of a returning New Orleanian's troubles. With housing issues, employment complications, a ruptured community and a bedraggled city, there are many pressing problems New Orleanians are concerned about. However, the mute and dumb stoplights whispered that something sinister and irreparable had happened. The anomaly of inoperable streetlights haunted me throughout my visit.

My brother and my father spoke to me angrily, as though I were an outsider when I told them what I had seen. (Of course I am an outsider, I am not a Katrina survivor). "You haven't seen anything," they both told me gruffly. "What you saw has been cleaned up." And they were right. I hadn't seen anything. I hadn't seen the piles of debris outside of homes. I hadn't seen collapsed structures. I had not seen the destruction.

My father took me on a drive through the city. He took me down Carrolton pointing out that from Claiborne to Esplanade we saw perhaps two or three business open. We went around City Park through the neighborhoods that skirt Lakeview into Gentilly. And I began to see the destruction. Trees, giant trees uprooted. Balconies on the lakefront apartment buildings crumpled. Roofs, doors, and windows crushed. Fence posts wrenched out of the dirt. After we passed through 4 neighborhoods, my father asked, did you see one house that is inhabited? "No" I said. The area we covered easily included 2,000 houses. That's a conservative guess. These were middle class homes, as well as upper class homes. Some medium sized family homes and some large family homes. Abandoned. There was nothing and no one stirring.

We rolled into Gentilly and headed to my brother's house. My father paused at a corner and started mumbling to himself. "What?" I asked him. "I forgot to count," he said. "Count what?" I asked. "Streets," he said. "There are no signs." The storm yanked the street signs down and they have not been replaced. We rolled right past my brother's house. Why? The huge tree that identified their house had disappeared, changing the character of the property. We looked at their empty home quietly. I was thinking of the video my brother had shown me of the interior of the house the day he and his wife went to clean it out. The mold, the buckled floors, the unrecognizable soaked clothing, the split tv console and inoperable television. Everything had to go. The newly renovated kitchen, the couch, the beds, the books, the refrigerator. "Who helped y'all?" I asked. "Nobody," my brother said. "Just us two," my sister-in-law said.

Now, this is an odd occurrence. I have a big family, my sister-in-law has a big family, but this was my first moment of understanding what it means to come home and rebuild. It means you are on your own. You can't call on your neighbors, they're not in the city. You can't call on your siblings, they're spread across the nation. You can't depend on the city, they're still drawing up plans and concepts. They haven't even decided which neighborhoods are going to be saved and which are going to be demolished. Six months later, everyone who goes home to rebuild is still going on their own.

We continued on to SUNO—Southern University of New Orleans. The water lines on the brick buildings and the empty campus said it all. This was a destroyed university complex. It appeared that no one had been back to start pulling things together. "That's millions of dollars in damages," my father said. I just nodded my head mutely. What was there to say? We continued on to the winding roads around the green neighborhood of Pontchartrain Park. That's when I started to notice the insides of the homes. Some of them were full of damaged items and others of them—many of them—had been gutted. I could see the wood supports of the homes, the only thing left of the interior. Imagine all the house in your neighborhood abandoned and gutted.

Gutting is a now a major reality in New Orleans. In order to rebuild you have to clear all your personal effects out of your home. (Most of these personal items will be unsalvageable. They will go in a soggy heap in front of your home until it is removed. You will decorate your home with new things. You will attempt to forget your mementoes. You will buy new clothing for yourself and your children.) Then you will pay someone to gut your house—tear out the floor, the walls, the ceilings and do mold abatement. Then you have to rebuild. (When you rebuild you are now mandated to meet new elevation codes in flood areas—meaning the cost to rebuild may be more than what is approved by your insurance company based on the value of your original home.) As you can imagine, the complications are innumerable. Where are you going to live, for example, while you are going through this arduous process? In a city when everyone is rebuilding, who are you going to contract to work on your house? Depending on your insurance company's response to your attempt to collect on your claim, how are you going to afford to do this work?

Six months after the storm, my sister-in-law tells me she just got a check from her insurance company to gut her house. The check is written out to the mortgage company and the homeowner and it's only a fraction of the full amount owed them. The money is to be applied to the first step of rebuilding. Once the house is gutted, the insurance company must approve the work before releasing the next check. Some people—of course—are getting nothing at all from their insurance companies. My sister-in-law explains all this to me in the living room of their newly rented house. They are now living uptown (in one of the areas least impacted by the storm). As my brother notes on his blog, the rent on their new apartment is more than 130% of their monthly mortgage payment—a payment they are still required to make despite the fact that their home is uninhabitable. Last word from home was that my brother was working 7 days a week. The overtime is helping to defray the exorbitant cost of being committed to rebuilding a city that is hesitant to invest in reconstructing the city.

Another reality of post-Katrina New Orleans is trailers. Lightweight trailers on wheels have been FEMA's solution to the catch-22 situation of New Orleanians who want to rebuild but have nowhere to live while they work on their homes. In "Trailers, Vital After Hurricane, Now Pose Own Risks on Gulf," journalist Eric Lipton states: "More than 87,100 families in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are living in the FEMA trailers, while only some 2,300 are in sturdier mobile homes." Most people living in these FEMA trailers are living close to their damaged and "partially reconstructed homes." With hurricane season less than three months away, concern is surfacing about the safety of the trailers. "'They're campers,' Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi told a Senate committee this month. 'They're not designed to be used as housing for a family for months, much less years. The trailers don't provide even the most basic protection from high winds or severe thunderstorms, much less tornadoes or hurricanes.'" The debris that is an ever-present reality in post-Katrina New Orleans and the Gulf Coast "can turn into dangerous projectiles when the wind picks up."

Eric Lipton explains why FEMA ordered these lightweight trailers. "FEMA ordered far more travel trailers than mobile homes after the hurricane because the trailers could be towed to a homeowner's property and quickly dropped into place. Being portable, they are not generally covered by building codes and not explicitly banned in flood zones."

Not EXPLICITLY banned in flood zones. In other words, there are some sturdier mobile homes that are banned from flood zones. However, because these trailers are intended for recreational use, they aren't even considered homes. If they aren't homes, then they have no flood-related regulations. So you will live in a flimsy piece of metal while you build your home up to new flood-safe standards. How's that for irony?

But there's more. These FEMA trailers may not be placed in the street, so if you have no space on your property, you can't camp near your house. Because people are living (not camping) in these trailers, each trailer needs to be hooked up to a sewage line and a water line. It's good to have electricity too. So if you need a trailer to rebuild your home and your neighborhood hasn't had restored utilities, you won't be able to live close to your home. Two friends of the family from the Mid-City area of New Orleans don't have space on their property and, until February did not have water or electricity on their street. As a consequence, they have settled their trailer on my uncle's property in the Faubourg Marigny area, about half an hour away. They have a good sense of humor about the situation, as do my aunt and uncle. My aunt and uncle's home did not flood given my uncle's habit of checking the elevation of all the property he buys. As such they have opened their doors to a revolving parade of relatives and friends. They consider themselves a safe house.

The friends living in a trailer gave my brother and I a tour describing the lengths they had to go through to get a hole in the sewage line fixed and a burning smell connected to the electricity examined. They have outfitted the trailer with decorations and fabric. It is their only home while they reconstruct their property in Mid-City. This claustrophobia-inducing box is barely big enough for one person, yet it is said to sleep six. Two in the bedroom, two on the table that converts into a bed, and two on bunks in an area that looks like a closet with absolutely NO headroom. Pointing out all the child-safety hazards, they assured us the trailers were no place for children. In an effort to make the trailer their own, they got a friend to decorate the exterior of their trailer. This act of spirit is, however, a felony. It is strictly against the law to decorate the exterior of FEMA trailers.

My father continued our tour by taking me out to New Orleans East—home of numerous apartment complexes and big houses of the black middle class. Also the home of Village de l'Est, a Vietnamese neighborhood. There the destruction was worse. I began to see completely collapsed roofs. I saw abandoned cars and streets blocked off by debris. Apparently some people can't get to their homes due to debris and blockage. We drove by my uncle's house, where the water was shoulder high on the first floor. The apartment complexes were completely destroyed. My brother had his home in one of those complexes. When he returned to the city, his belongings were intact because he was on the second floor, but he found evidence of people squatting in his apartment. Among the strange personal effects, there were diapers leading to the conclusion that the people who sought refuge in his apartment had an infant.

By this point we had driven uncountable miles. My father bitterly commenting on the impossibility of rebuilding the wide expanse of destroyed residences. Seeing all those homes made me think of all the families that lived in the thousands and thousands of structures. Each home, each apartment represented a displaced family and an individual family's burden. Any homeowner deciding to recover and/or rebuild their property would have to deal with their own drama. It felt as if the city had done nothing to encourage the rebuilding. This isn't true—of course. All major thoroughfares had been cleared of debris and blockage. We saw very few abandoned cars on the street and virtually no refrigerators or dishwashers. I suppose the city just hasn't had the opportunity to address the piles of debris, collapsed houses, some of the felled trees, and the dead streetlights.

My father kept stressing to me that the New Orleans I was seeing was much improved. The fact that we could drive smoothly and tour these neighborhoods was a testament to the clean up that had been done. The city's clean up had allowed, and possibly encouraged, residents to return. The city, which was empty for months, is now considerably more active. There are many reasons for people's return. My brother and his family returned because the elementary school his children attend reopened and inferred that they would give away the spots of any children who weren't back by January. Two aunts, an uncle, and my grandmother settled in Baton Rouge, about an hour and a half away. As the city regains more and more vibrance, my aunt and my uncle have separate business concerns that bring them into the city more and more frequently. With more returning residents, there are more businesses open or looking to open. The return of jobs means the return of residents. My father and his wife are making plans to return based on a forthcoming work opportunity.

My mother spent a few months in Oaxaca with me and is now restarting her life in New Orleans. One of her first orders of business was restocking the house and registering the title of a new car. Running those brief errands turned out to be something of a wild goose chase. We had to go out to Metairie to shop because the big grocery store near my sister-in-law's (who was shuttling us around) had not yet opened. Then we went to the Department of Motor Vehicles. There was a huge iron tower fallen on its side and dominating the parking lot. The building was fenced in, structurally damaged and obviously not open for business. We drove to Kenner looking for another DMV office. When we got there, there were people spilling out the door. Someone had a chair and was sitting outside. My mother went in intending to ask a question. She came out dismayed, I have to stand in line to get a number, she said. This is post-Katrina New Orleans.

Having chauffeured me through the about half of the city's residential neighborhoods my father turned his car toward the Lower 9th Ward. I was getting a fuller understanding of why he's said repeatedly that the city will not recover. The scale of the destruction is unimaginable. The painful pace of progress suggests a government that is overwhelmed, inept, or unconcerned. Driving through the multiple abandoned neighborhoods, it is easy to see how some New Orleanians feel abandoned. Abandonment is the sensation that that repeatedly echoed through me as my father wheeled his car through neighborhood after neighborhood after neighborhood. These people are on their own. And yet, for many New Orleans is still the only place for them to be. It's home. It's family history. It's the roots of their existence.

The stores you remember may or may not be there. The services you used to rely on may or may not be available. Your loved ones—friends and family—may or may not have the interest, resources, or energy to rebuild. But the weather is still beautiful. The accents are still the same. People are still open and talkative. And the city still has so much flavor. For those who live and breathe New Orleans, nothing will make them quit the city. Not even the fact that 75% of the residences stand empty. For those that have returned or are orchestrating their return, the shell of the city is still sweeter than a fully functioning new town. It is a fact of growing up steeped in the cultures and traditions of a unique, contradictory, passionate, celebratory place: if you're not home, you're in a foreign land. And for most New Orleanians, not being home, is the worst fate they can imagine.

Be well. Be love(d).

Kiini Ibura Salaam

Vol. 53, In Mexico: A City In Celebration

noreply@blogger.com (Kiini) — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 23:25:00 +0000

Oaxaca, Oaxaca
Mexico

It's been a few months since my last post. Where oh where have I been, you ask? (Besides in my underground workshop scribbling away on my novel,) I've been in the thrall of a city in constant celebration. Since my last post, Oaxaca has been celebrating one holiday or another. Celebration is what Oaxaca is all about. It reminds me of New Orleans in that respect. Everything is motivation for a party or a festival of some type. And every season holds a few holidays that must be celebrated. Interestingly, Oaxaca's last holiday gave me insight into a New Orleans tradition.

It's January. What that traditionally means in New Orleans (and Brazil and Trinidad and various other locations) is that it is Carnival season—Mardi Gras Time. In New Orleans, that means we will hear Mardi Gras songs on the radio and in offices and schools all across the city people will be eating king cake. (How much of it will be retained this year—post-Katrina—has yet to be determined.)

King cake is a bready, donut-like cake in the shape of a circle or an oval. There is a dry variety, sprinkled with sugar—often in Mardi Gras colors: purple, green and gold—and there is a cinnamon roll variety, which is softer and sometimes has a creamy filling. Some in the office or at school buys the first cake of the season and everyone partakes. Whoever gets the slice with the baby in it has to buy the next cake.

The baby is a little plastic baby with outstretched arms and legs. [Nina Simone is now singing out of my iTunes: "There is a house in New Orleans / they call it the Rising Son / and it's been the run/ruin of many poor girls / and me, oh lord I'm one."]

Now what a plastic baby embedded in a cake has to do with Mardi Gras has always been beyond me. And why is it called a King cake, for that matter? Some bakeries do put a cheap plastic crown on it, but that does nothing to answer the mystery.

Well here I am in Oaxaca. January 2006. And in the windows of the bakeries, what do I see? King cakes! That's right, cakes in the shape of ovals or circles with sugar and dried fruit on top. The cake is for the holiday of the season: The Day of the Three Kings, January 6. You know the three kings that brought gifts for baby Jesus. Well, this cake is called Rosco de los Reyes. I don't know what Rosco translates into, but the Reyes are Kings. King cake!

Furthermore, there is a plastic baby baked in the cake. This one looks like a figurine of a child, rather than a baby, but it is safe to assume it is the baby Jesus. And whoever gets the baby has to throw a party for El Dia de los Reyes.

I'm not sure exactly what all this means, but I got quite a bit of excitement finding out what the whole king cake/baby thing was all about. I'm not sure if we got it from our shared conquistador: Spain. Or if the king cake came to New Orleans by way of Mexico. Certainly New Orleans has been an international city since its inception. In a book on Latin Jazz, Jelly Roll Morton was quoted as stating that he was taught by Mexicans, who in turn were taught by Cubans. The history of jazz has a few surprising contributions from Mexico.

The other part of the tradition of the Dia de los Reyes has to do with children and helium balloons. Traditionally, Santa Claus had no place in Mexico. Due to the exploding domination of Western culture through the media, Santa Claus has been introduced to Oaxacan children relatively recently. However, in previous days, children didn't receive gifts on Christmas. They got them on the Day of the Kings. There are special helium balloons with images of the kings on one side and some children's character on the other (my daughter's balloon had Elmo on it). When you buy the balloon you get a piece of paper for your child to write a wish list to the kings. The kids release the balloons in the sky with the note—thereby helping to kill off even more of oceanic life—and the next day their parents, oops I mean the Kings, leave gifts on their shoes.

Going backwards from The Day of the Kings, we celebrated the New Year with a few Oaxacan/Latin American/Spanish traditions. After an impromptu Kwanzaa celebration (Kuumba-creativity), we waited for midnight, then stuffed ourselves with 12 grapes in the space of a minute—you get one wish for every grape. Then we lit sparklers and went outside with our suitcases to cement our chances for good journeys in the coming year. As we were celebrating loudly in the street, revelers from a patio party across the street noticed us. Before we knew it, a woman came out from the party with her suitcase and met us in the road. She was like a delegate from another town, traveling to wish us well. All nine of us exchanged hugs with the friendly stranger and wished each other Felicidades.

At Christmas time, in addition to celebrating Jesus, Oaxcans have the Radish Festival. Now, I had heard of the Radish Festival before coming to Oaxaca, but I did not believe it was real. I was watching this cartoon based on wrestlers from the Mexican Lucha Libre (free fight) "league". The particular episode I was watching showed a radish festival—people were eating radishes, they made sculptures from radishes and had radish contests. I thought it was something wildly imaginative that sprung from the heads of the cartoon's creators.

Imagine my surprise when I started to hear of December 23 as La Noche de las Rabanas (The Night of the Radishes). We stood in an unimaginably long line (about 4 blocks long) to see radish sculptures! The exhibition also featured flower creations and corn husk sculptures, but by far the most popular sculptures were the radish sculpture. One of the breathtaking sculptures was a four foot tall sculpture of the Virgin of Guadeloupe made completely out of radishes. The artist had helpers who periodically sprayed the sculpture to keep it moist and lovely. Other artists went miniature by recreating small scale versions of common Oaxaca scenes. We saw street parties, churches, folk tale characters and mescal farms recreated. It was amazing. [Nina Simone just mentioned New Orleans again, singing that she met "Mr. Bojangles" in the Big Easy.]

A few nights before that, we were given the surprise opportunity to give Jesus his just do. We had gone to dinner with friends and when we came out of the restaurant there were musicians in the street and people walking with sparklers in their hands. "Oh, it's a posada," my friends said, "let's join in." So we joined in and wandered the streets (stopping traffic) with the spiritual group that included musicians, a man waving a smoky incense burner on a chain, a little kid dressed as an angel and a little kid dressed as a shepherd, a few women carrying saints, and other members of a church congregation. When the group arrived to their church, they reenacted Joseph and Mary's pleas to come in and have shelter. This reenactment is done in song. The people outside sing a plea, the people inside shut the doors and sing a refusal to let them in. And the song goes on and on back and forth until finally the doors are flung open and—symbolic of Joseph and Mary finding shelter—everyone is let into the church.

Every church in Oaxaca hosts a posada. In the downtown area there are 25 churches. That means there are a number of posadas going on every night during Christmas time. At my daughter's day care they hosted a little posada and had three piñatas. These piñatas are especially for the Christmas season and look like colorful, shiny stars.

When the Christmas season was just heating up, coming home one night we found ourselves in the middle of not one, not two, but three street parties. The street parades are called Calendas—they are mounted for weddings; corporate and educational anniversaries; and holidays. Calendas often include huge puppets and large paper covered globes that men usually carry in advance of the parade to announce its arrival. Women are hired to wear traditional dress from one of the seven regions of Oaxaca and carry baskets on their heads with flower-covered symbols or saints. On one street women in traditional dress were kicking up their heels to a brass band. On the next street a university group were carrying globes, huge puppets and following men dressed in suits covered in colorful strips of cloth. And in the plaza between the two streets, two different groups were lighting toros.

Toros are bulls. These bulls are papier mache and on their horns are these wheels made of strips of bamboo. Attached at intervals on the bamboo wheel, are bundles of explosives. After the wheels are lit, someone dances under the bull in circles while the wheels whirl about with colorful lit firecrackers! Sound a little dangerous? Yes. We watch from afar.

Causing a little more concern are the castillos (castles). These are tall structures that look more like towers than castles. There are multi levels of fireworks. The bottom is lit and carefully arranged firecrackers start popping. Some of them are wheels, some just pop off color. Then as the bottom level is exhausted, the fuse is lit for the next level and so on, until the fireworks reach the top of the castillo. Often a word is spelled out in fireworks and the final moment is when the wheel at the top of the castillo whirls faster and faster as fireworks are sizzling and sparking, until it detaches from the top of the castle and goes flying into the air. Can you say run for cover?

But, if you do run for cover, you must be aware of your surroundings. If not, you may—like a friend of mine—end up deciding to take shelter in the doorway of a church. Sounds safe, right? But only if strings of fireworks have not been hung from the top of the church, intending to go raining down to the ground. Then you might be stuck with fireworks raining down in front of you and you might get holes in your jacket and your shirt and little burns on your arms.

A month before this extravaganza of explosives, we found ourselves in the midst of one of Oaxaca's biggest celebrations: the Day of the Dead. Day of the Dead is not Halloween. However, just as Santa Claus is making his entry into Mexico, many Mexicans are beginning to mix Halloween with Day of the Dead.

A promotional pamphlet says that Oaxaca's Day of the Dead celebrations are the result of the syncretism between the cult to the dead of prehispanic Zapotec and Mixtec culture and the Catholic church's "commemoration of the Faithful Departed." Despite the fact that the Tourist Commission put out a schedule for the Day of the Dead, Day of the Dead is not a very public holiday.

After finding the scheduled events to be lackluster and not well attended, we realized that the government was trying to create a public holiday where one doesn't exist. Day of the Dead may be one of the single most important holidays in Oaxaca, but it's not a public holiday. It is a personal holiday when the whole city celebrates their ancestors in a personal or family fashion.

There are street comparsas (parades) celebrating the dead, but most of the celebration happens in family homes, small communities, and outer villages.

The Day of the Dead pamphlet says:

Each family has its own and different customs in order to celebrate Day of the Dead, some of them praying for their beloved ones, others visiting the cemeteries to decorate the graves that stay unnoticed the rest of the year [as well as] participating and enjoying the altars of the dead which are set in different houses.

Viewing the altars was one of the most beautiful elements of Day of the Dead. Leading up to November 1st and 2nd everyone—hotels, private homes, businesses, schools—sets up amazing altars to honor the dead. At the market, vendors were selling piles and piles of marigolds—the official flower of the dead. Marigolds, it appears, are weeds. The bright gold flowers have a strong, earthy scent and are sold with dirt still clinging to their thick stems.

The marigold—in addition to a wine-colored, fuzzy wrinkled flower called "velvet" flowers—accounted for much of the beauty of the altars. The altars were literally covered with these marigolds. Marigolds were scattered on the table tops, strung on sugar cane arcs behind the altar, and ripped up and strewn on the floor before the altars.

Every Day of the Dead altar was crowned by an arc, most often constructed with two pieces of sugar cane, bent and tied to meet in the middle. According to a pamphlet put out by the Escuela de Bellas Artes, the two pieces of sugar cane represent the centrality and importance of the number 2. Traditionally, the number 2 represents duality: heaven and earth, men and women, days and nights. In Zapotec culture, one was the number of heaven: the eternal and two was the number of the earth: the temporal. Therefore the arc of sugar cane—hung with flowers, fruit, and other decorations—communicate "the desire of those who live on earth to unite with those who inhabit the eternal realm."

Whether or not most Mexicans remain aware of the traditional significance of every element of the altars, it is clear how fundamentally important celebrating the ancestors are to most Oaxcans. Viewing the altars was a moving experience. In addition to flowers, the altars have photos of departed loved ones, black mole, chocolate, food, fruit, drink, anything the family member may have liked to eat or drink (or smoke).

Day of the Dead altars also have pan de muerto—the bread of the dead. This round loaf of bread is sprinkled with sesame seeds and baked especially for the season of the dead. Each loaf of bread has a face and some are even formed like bodies, rather than a round lump of loaf. Eating the bread is supposed to represent eating your own flesh—embracing death, whenever it should come.

Similarly, altars are also decorated with little skulls made out of sugar or chocolate. It is not unheard of for someone to give you one with your name written over it. When you eat a skull with your name on it you are laughing at and playing with death.

Day of the dead is a dual purpose celebration. It honors the dead, as mandated by the Christian calendar. And it continues the ancient cult of the dead that reveres and embraces death as the other side of life. There is, in fact, a whole branch of the Christian church connected to death. Their icon is a female skeleton. When I asked about the skeleton, one cab driver told me she is death. "I love her, I adore her, I worship her," he said. A little confused, I asked if he was part of the Christian church. "Yes," he told me without hesitation or equivocation. "Yes."

Skeletons and skulls are ubiquitous in the iconography of Mexican arts and crafts, however during Day of Dead there were skeletons EVERYWHERE. The skeletons—like their human counterparts—are captured doing all kinds of things in all kinds of dress. Skeletons dressed as revolutionaries from the Mexican War dance a happy jig, policeman skeletons wave at passerby, a gorgeously hatted female skeleton in a slinky dress kisses a suited male skeleton while behind them a bar full of skeletons gamble with cards. I suppose this means in the afterlife we all continue partaking in human pleasures.

Although we were unsuccessful at getting our Day of the Dead celebration cranking, we did make it to San Felipe where people were gathering in the cemetery to spend the night with their dead. People have a 24 hour window to feed their deceased relatives. By November 1, all should be done. Otherwise the dearly departed won't get to eat

Outside the cemetery vendors had set up stalls selling food, flowers, and candles. People were bundled up, babies were wrapped tight and families were ready to stay the night. Most graves had been swept and cleaned and covered in flowers and candles. Plates of food and drink sat balanced on headstones and one group of men were singing to their dead.

The mood in the cemetery varied from jubilant—little children in devil masks trick-or-treating—to somber, a quiet family gathered around the grave of a loved one who had just passed on a few months before. The energy in the cemetery was indescribably and overwhelmingly positive. The cemetery grounds were aglow with candlelight and vibrating with neighbors who had a long history with each other. An ancient tree towers over the center of the cemetery. The busy and devoted bustle of people communicated a warmth and comfort that I and my friends did not want to leave behind. As one of my friends observed—the ceremony just felt so healthy. Witnessing the divine communal act of a whole community mourning and caring for their dead at once was awe-inspiring. Let the circle be unbroken.

There is so much more to tell, but this report has gone on long enough. Suffice to say the stilt walkers with their skeleton masks, the sand sculptures—flat sculpted sand in the form of people, animals or gods, and the village comparsas—groups of men who carry big books and travel first to the cemetery to get the souls of the dead and then roam the town, telling tales of the town's inhabitants and making social and political commentary—carry huge gusts of karmic consequence and cultural wealth.

I had my fingers smashed during the Day of the Dead. The driver of a pickup truck managed to slam my fingers in his driver's door. After my daughter was ushered away, I went howling down the street in search of a doctor. I found myself, though deeply pained, not so harmed. No bones were broken. The bruised and bleeding fingernails did not stop me from getting fruit and candles to an infirm neighbor who was almost hysterical at the thought that she wouldn't get her altar up in time for her deceased loved ones to have some food.

Just as I have no way of knowing whether my one bruised nail and my other completely unattached nail is going to remain with me or fall off, I find it hard to categorize exactly what I've gotten out of witnessing the amazing Days of the Dead. In addition to being inspired by this beautiful city's unequivocal mandate that it is time to celebrate the ancestors, I was personally moved to make an altar for my deceased grandparents. Every time I walked into a friends home, I met a new ancestor and heard a new story about an amazing soul who touched someone's life. It is beautiful to be nudged into maintaining contact with the continuum of human beings whose existence allowed me to be. Let the circle be unbroken.

Be well. Be love(d).

Kiini Ibura Salaam