Word Gatherer: Life in a Time of Saturn Rising

E. Ethelbert Miller asked me, along with Nimah Ismail Nawwab and Jody
Bolz, to contribute a blog piece for his E-Notes. You can check out
E-Notes at http://www.eethelbertmiller1.blogspot.com/

From New Orleans:

Leaving
home a week ago, I packed some summer clothes, bug spray, sunblock, and
a list of books by strong women, spirits to sustain me during my month
in New Orleans.
Suheir Hammad’s Zaatar Diva,Maxine Hong Kingston’s
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Leah Lakshmi
Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Consensual Genocide,Ishle Yi Park’s The
Temperature of This Water,Ruth Forman’s Renaissance,Joy Harjo’s The
Woman Who Fell From the Sky,Aurora Levins Morales’ Remedios: Stories of
Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriquenas,Kimiko Hahn’s
Volatile and a copy of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical
Women of Color& Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About
Asian American Women.

A year ago, an e-mail from Suheir Hammad,
who had arrived in the city weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated
the city and earlier in the summer encouraged me not to give up my
writing. Her words as witness to the material of people’s personal
lives and stories and disasters. Later, hearing her read that piece as
testimony would make me break apart, in a way that none of the video
footage and photographs could.

On arrival, someone told me
everyone’s a survivor here, the whole city a survivor. In a city where
so much needs to be done, so much left, so much change, so much pain,
so much survival. I wondered what this would bring up for me, healing
and surviving too, in my own way. I was scared to come down and immerse
myself in community work again, but it’s been inspiring and, surprising
to me, healing.

I have been watching Hotel Rwanda and Whale
Rider and seeing how it connects to my daily work here in New Orleans,
writing my freewrites every morning, reading one poem every day to
bless my day with beauty and intention, and bearing witness to those I
meet, writing down stories at night. Yesterday, beautiful words at a
memorial for a woman who had been struck down by a car on the side of
the road one day after Hurricane Katrina.

I brought out my pen,
which brought me to the doorstep of a survivor. I spent an afternoon
out of the sun, remembering and writing and laughing and crying. This
is why I write.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 10th, 2006 at 10:52 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.