wayfinding in GA

making visible what america would rather not see

“To be a bride of my own lamentation
I wear a dress not of time’s poisoned quills
but feathers of discontent — kingfishers
ghosting in cornstalks, my field of frozen flutes.
The edge of descent, digression’s highway
brings a particulate ash to my mouth,
starry metals of the meadow’s cold snap,
ravens in the sycamore scorched to black.
I follow their echo’s loop and chase.
I master the map of never, raft
its fragments, mouth the brightness of human’s
leftover snow, details of fever-clouds
where the convent dissolves in violence.
I wear the canyon like a blank eye,
lay before the never-returning light
my silhouette, fossil of the drowned town’s scroll.”

- from Jennifer Elise Foerster’s poem “Coosa”

bright, delicious GA tomatoes I picked up this week to make tomato pie

It’s been a week and two days since I’ve moved to Georgia. It occurs to me now that everywhere I’ve ever lived has been a place I’ve known well before going. My family moved from Camp Lejeune to Columbia to be closer to family. I went to Clemson, following friends to the college town I had roamed throughout my adolescence. Then off to Greenville, a small city I knew through my childhood summers. This is my first time in a place I don’t know at all. Every small thing is more difficult and disorienting — from needing a GPS to find the grocery store to scouting out the nearest good cup of coffee. Of course, there’s also new possibility to orient myself in a more intentional manner. In thinking through this, I returned to a few poems about lost and found places.

One of these poems is Foerster’s “Coosa” which I first read in the June 2018 issue of Poetry magazine. The introduction to that issue was an essay by Heid E. Erdrich entitled “There is no such thing as Native American poetry.” It’s a short read, and well worth your attention. Foerster’s poem takes it’s name from a Native Chiefdom in the Northwest portion of Georgia. Spanish colonizers brought death and disease to this nation sometime around the 17th century. The capital of Coosa was later excavated as an archeological site named “Little Egypt.”

Foerster’s poem is a desolate landscape of echo and frost, silhouettes and scorched earth. And yet Foerster, despite (or perhaps because of) discontent, persists to follow their echo’s loop and chase / master the map of never, raft / its fragments, mouth the brightness of human’s / leftover snow. Never to be parted from her bridegroom, Lamentation.

Chief of the Crow Nation Plenty Coups (1848-1932) said, “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened.” Materiality and temporality are both frozen in Foerster’s land of shadows. Hidden, invisible things begin to take shape, and things once sturdy, given, and visible begin to melt and fade. Space and time condense into something sparse, ghostly, fleeting. After this, nothing happened. For the first time, I connected this poem to one I first read in college years ago: Natasha Trethewey’s “Theories of Time and Space,” her opening poem for Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Theories of Time and Space

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion—dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on the mangrove swamp—buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry—tome of memory,
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph—who you were—
will be waiting when you return.

These poems were the backdrop for my reading of the essays “The Poor Person’s Defense of Riots: Practical Looting, Rational Riots, and the Shortcomings of Black Liberalism” by Delio Vasquez and “Decolonize Together: Moving Beyond a Politics of Solidarity Toward a Politics of Decolonization” by Harsha Walia.

Both poems offer us maps of displacement, wayfinding towards the spaces imperial america has made liminal and restricted to the margins. In another excerpt of “Coosa,” Foerster writes, “Writing from a lone corner of the nation / I no longer recognize the difference / between the name of the wall and the wall / itself.” Both essays offer us other kinds of maps: maps which refuse to make invisible the radical struggles for liberation and sovereignty. A few things I’m thinking through since reading these two essays during my first week in GA:

1. Vasquez’s unpacking of the typical “moralistic arguments that portray rioting as driven primarily by emotion.” In the past, I found myself making similar arguments to defend riots and lawbreaking. In the summer of 2020, when I spent a lot of time in the streets during Black Lives Matter protests, I was surprised to find this understanding did not make sense of my own actions, nor the actions of most of the organizers, protestors, and activists I knew. Our motivations were multi-varied, as was our individual and collective thresholds for lawbreaking, but all of this was rational. We discussed various tactics and strategies before, during, and after our time in the streets and our choices were most often informed by our risks, responsibilities, and political ideologies. I regret the times I previously simplified the actions of protestors to emotional outbursts. This framework is incredibly paternalistic and finds it’s roots in both white supremacy and the bourgeoisie-thinking that believes there’s a class of experts (politicians, think-tank CEOs, non-profit professionals, etc) who “know best.”

2. The importance of lawbreaking, rowdy work, and militant resistance. Vasquez cites a conversation between Coretta Scott King and Malcolm X regarding the difference in tactics between their two veins of the Civil Rights Movement. During this discussion, Malcolm X states his militancy “could make it easier” for racists to hear Dr. King, acknowledging the importance in diversifying our tactics. From a purely pragmatic viewpoint: a riotous backdrop might make pacifist or “moderate” proposals more appealing. Forgive my frankness here, but in a time when Democrats simply will not shut up about reigning in the Left, taming the activist branches of progressive movements, or just plain whining about their dislike of “slogans” such as Defund The Police, it would be refreshing to see them stop punching from the Right and instead use the “extreme” demands of the Left to make their small steps seem more measured, possible, or perhaps even necessary to stave off the mob. As Vasquez writes, “we do ourselves a disservice when we attack others for doing the important political work that we ourselves are not willing to do — work that in fact allows us to do what we do…. [our] voices would not be heard were it not for the background roar of those mobs shouting outside our legislative buildings and in the streets.”

3. Walia’s exhortation that we must act in solidarity, not as allies giving *support* to a cause, and that this solidarity must arise from an “ethic of responsibility.” Here, I wish just to restate what Walia has written, “When faced with this truth [understanding ourselves as beneficiaries of the illegal settlement of indigenous people’s land], it is common for activists to get stuck in their feelings of guilt, which I would argue is a state of self-absorption that actually upholds privilege.” My faith tells me, “I must become less; He must become more.” Learning to de-center myself is essential in justice work. If I have a prayer for my time in GA, it’s that I grow in this practice.

I hope to use to blog to continue conversations around organizing practices. I’d love to hear what you’re thinking through these days, so please leave a comment. Additionally, if you like what you’re reading, please share Forward Notion with your friends to continue the discussion.

Next week I’ll post a reflection on “Dangerous Allies” and “A Critique of Ally Politics” from Taking Sides. I hope you’ll consider reading along!