Dion and Sophie, Alice Hu and Edward Said, New York Stories for Springtime

 

Alice and Sophie and Edward's books, a few zines. 

Dion and Sophie, Alice Hu and Edward Said, New York Stories for Springtime

Stories fill the New York in springtime, classes and midterms, holidays and spring breaks.  In my case, three particular narratives stuck with me, stories transplants arriving and finding something here, Sophie from Poland after the war in Ditmas, Alice Hu, who came here to be an organizer, and Edward Said, who wrote about his home country, the Palestine he was born to and forced to leave, stories of exile and dislocation, place and belong.

Mom’s childhood best friend, Dion, Mom and I strolled through her garden before Dion and I ventured over the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge, to Brooklyn, from Bay Ridge to Ditmas where Sophie lived, taking in the Victorian, Queen Anne, Tudor, Greek Revival, Colonial Revival hottages, where Sophie might have met Stingo. After Ditmas, we explored the Brooklyn Museum, with its odd relics and characters, the Dinner Party, the Egyption Wing, the copy machine manifesto exhibition, monuments to DIY culture, critical promiscuity, punk zines, queer zines, fanzines that regular people, testament to devotion, obsession, longing and missing, bottom up cultural production. Finishing the day, we explored a few of our haunts on Smith Street, where we took Dion to Barely Disfigured, an over the top cocktail bar, for a cocktail, before dinner at Big Tiny, where we met Al, greeting the proprietors, celebrating a long glorious  day with a big meal. 

Our conversation kept turning back Sophies Choice, William Styron’s novel about transplants to Brooklyn, one via Poland, another the South after the war, atrocities chasing them, always in the rear view window.  “In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan,” confessed the novel’s protagonist, “so I had to move to Brooklyn.”  Soon enough this Southern transplant, Stingo stumbles into a rooming house in Brooklyn, where he meets his neighbors, including Sophie. And is immediately taken by them. “There are friends one makes at a youthful age in whom one simply rejoices,” writes Styron. “Let your love flow out on all living things.”  Comraderie followed, so did wounds, ghost, apparitions, and shadows that seemed to grasp at the three of them.

We talked about Sophie’s recollections all day.  Seeing himself as a sort of Stingo, Dion would share story after story about his years in Columbus, his journeys to Vietnam, Sewannee and back, recalling his family friend Carson McCullers, old boyfriends, Jimmy and Bill and Mark, and his move out to San Francisco. Finishing our Brooklyn tour, we drove out to Carson’s old address, the February House, demolished by the BQE, near Truman’s in Brooklyn Heights.

That evening, Mom, Will, Dion and I played hearts in Princeton. Gradually Mom got the hang of it. Virginia even dropped by for lunch, her secret, lots of good friends. And I somehow ended with the winning, lowest score.  "Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn from time to time," said Will after our ten games of hearts. 

The stories would be many over the week. 

Wednesday, my friend Alice Hu came to speak with my intersectionality class about her life in New York, connecting her immigrant experience with that my of my students.

Over the last couple of years, Hu and I have worked together around climate and housing legislation, most importantly, the NYC Dirty buildings bill, now Local Law 97, requiring large buildings over 25,000 square feet to cut emissions by 40% by 2030. 

An organizer with New York Communities for Change, Hu’s seen her fair share of change, moving to New York at the age of 17 by way of Illinois. Arriving here, there was a lot reflect on, she explained, telling the class her story.  In high school she organized a walk-out after Michael Brown was shot by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. It was a bit of a Renaissance in organizing. Watching thoses demonstrations, Hu came to see that differences are important. The child of imigrant parents, she was discouraged from getting involved. Her parents had been the Cultural Revolution in China; they had their own idea of the ways to live and get a foothold in our culture.  They wanted something more stable for their daughter. “You are a girl,” they told her. What did that mean?

Of course, their American daughter had her own ideas. Hu eventually moved to New York City to attend Columbia university. There she learned about the struggles of other immigrants, the ravages of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, effectively banning Chinese Laborers in the US for a decade, access to work jeopradized over identity. “Difference are important,” says Hu. “At the end of the day, we all just want to be more powerful and have the outcomes we want.”

In New York, Hu started looking at problems and issues and ways to organize around them. She saw the same roots in a lot of the issues she cared about, particularly around the climate and housing, where similar administrations and companies pushed for mutually destructive outcomes. A class line seemed to divide who got what, from housing market and even in education, where professors were ranked and paid according to a rigid hierarchy between full and part time laboers. Gradually, Alice came to see how easy it was for people to be divided around race and class and ethnicity and gender. Still, solidarity makes connections deeper, helping us recognize our interconnections.  We all depend upon each other, everyone connected in a web of association.  Hu found herself drawn to the expression from Lilla Watson:“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” She stated looking at history, thinking about ways to see herself and others and their struggles. She saw how movements overlapped and supported each other from Civil Rights to the Women’s movements, with Black Power and liberation movements deepenning connections supporting these movements and themselves. They gained a lot by doing so, advancing with the 1965 Immigration Reform, witnessing increased numbers of arrivals from African and Asia, as well as Southern and Eastern Europe, that gave immigrants more rights.  

Such lessons inform Alice’s understanding of intersectional organizing for change. “I have a deep belief in people,” says Alice, recalling the story of her plugging into direct action campaigns in Madrid during COP25 conference held there from 2 to 13 December 2019, attended by 25,000 people. There, a group of activists, including HU, engaged in civil disobedience to draw attention to the issue, makinig a statement in Madrid. 

With an intersectional lens, Hu started to consider the roots of the housing issue overlapping with the climate issue, connecting the dots between urban crisis, the ways poor communities endure disproportionate impacts of displacement, pollution and skyrocketting rents destroying neighborhoods, transforming places people live and work, separating people, leaving them with  poor housing. 

My students loved hearing Alice’s story. 

All week, we continued the conversation.   

Fellow union members and I called out the propensity toward austerity budgets coming our way, one year without a contract, we want #apeoplescunyin2024.

@yanaland regaled her fans at the Magician with stories about theater and horror movies at the monthly salon.

Friday was something like 4.8 magnitude, felt in Brooklyn from New Jersey. Images of the Loma Prieta Earthquake magnitude 6.9 in 1989 crash through my mind, the Landers quake in June of 1992 in So Cal after I graduated, 7.2 magnitude. wow. Wow.

That night, I joined my friends at Clockwork and The Lot Radio, a merge party at...195 North 14th Street, staying up late, becoming lost in the techno, finally back out dancing. 

Still, the city was becoming more divided, new condos everywhere, including downtown Brooklyn, not that everyone was particularly drawn to them. “It’s one thing to pay a premium to be 1,000 feet above Central Park,” said one observer. “but 1,000 feet above Trader Joe’s?”

On the ways to Mom’s for lunch, I listened to an oral history with Edward Said, another New York transplant, who found himself here after his family was forced to leave Palestine in 1848. How do we accept difference without hostility, wonderred Said.  All week, I read his books Orientalism and the Question of Palestein. I have always loved Said’s approach. Years ago, I found myself lost his text, Freud-and-the-non-European.  In it, he “proposes that Freud’s assumption that Moses was an Egyptian undermines any simple ascription of a pure identity, and further that identity itself cannot be thought or worked through without the recognition of the limits inherent in it… an unresolved, nuanced sense of identity might, if embodied in political reality, have formed, or might still form, the basis for a new understanding between Jews and Palestinians. Instead, Israel’s relentless march towards an exclusively Jewish state denies any sense of a more complex, inclusive past.”

Unfortunately, not enough of us recognize the kinds of limitations to identity, Said described. 

Thinking about it, Mom and I talked all afternoon about her travels. I asked out her trips to the Middle East, to Jordan, Israel, Iran, Jordan and Afganistan. The highlight of the 1965 trip to Iran was an afternoon at Persepolis, the capital of the Achaemenid Empire, in Marvdasht, by southern Zagros mountains. Mom recalled exploring the ancient city in 1965. I'll never forget it, she concluded as we toasted at lunch.

On the way back from our lunch, I listening more Said interviews about the conflict in Gaza, with its underlying histories of about Colonial control, the legacies of a crumbling Ottoman Empire, the 1917 Balfour declaration, issued by the British Government creating Israel, the Hebron Massacres, a Holocaust, one horror after another. Reconciliation is possible, my students and I had noted during class. We saw it in Rowanda and Ireland, why not Israel? 

History offers choices, include or exclude, dominate or integrate, building wall or longer tables," says José Andrés, "Every meal has the power to change the world." 

In an oral history toward the end of his life, Said tried to make sense his life and the vexing phantom’s he’d watch take shape about his region, the stereotypes, stigmas, images of otherness, that have gripped the world, transforming its relationship to the unknown.  Still, how do we make sense of who we are in relation to others, wonders Said. 

“Gramsci, in The Prison Notebooks, says something that has always tremendously appealed to me,” says EDWARD SAID.  “That history deposits in us our own history, our family's history, our nation's history, our tradition's history, which has left in us an infinity of traces, all kinds of marks, you know, through heredity, through collective experience, through individual experience, through family experience, relations between one individual and another, a whole book, if you like, on a series of, an infinity of traces, but there is no inventory, there's no orderly guide to it. So Gramsci says, “Therefore the task at the outset, is to try to compile an inventory,” in other words to try and make sense of it. And this seems to me to be the most interesting sort of human task. It's the task of interpretation. It's a task of giving history some shape and sense, for a particular reason, not just to show that my history is better than yours, or my history is worse than yours. I'm a victim and you're somebody who's oppressed people or so on, but rather, to understand my history in terms of other people's history, in other words to try to understand, to move beyond, to generalize one's own individual experience to the experience of others. And I think the great goal is in fact to become someone else. To transform itself from a unitary identity to an identity that includes the other without suppressing the difference. That, he says is the great goal. And for me I think that would be the case. That would be the notion of writing an inventory, historical inventory, which would try to understand not only to understand one's self but to understand one's self in relation to others and to understand others as if you would understand yourself….I think, the most dangerous idea at the end of the twentieth century. Unless we find ways to do it, and there are no short cuts to it, unless we find ways to do this, you know there is going to be wholesale violence of a sort represented by the Gulf War, by the killings in Bosnia, the Rwandan massacres and so on. I mean those are the pattern of emerging conflict that is extremely dangerous and needs to be counteracted and I think therefore it's correct to say that the challenge now is – I wouldn't call it anything other than coexistence. How does one co-exist with people whose religions are different, whose traditions and languages are different but who form part of the same community or polity in the national sense? How do we accept difference without violence and hostility? I've been interested in a field called Comparative Literature most all of my adult life and the ideal of Comparative Literature is not to show how English literature is really a secondary phenomenon to French literature or Arabic literature is kind of a poor cousin to Persian literature or any of those silly things, but to show them existing, you might say, as contrapuntal lines, in a great composition by which difference is respected and understood without coercion. And it's that attitude I think that we need.”

Hopefully, we can all find those “contrapuntal lines…. a great composition” in which “difference is respected and understood without coercion.” 

New York was in full bloom on Sunday. I woke up, strolling from Judson to Washington Square to Union Square, for coffee with Ray, greeting Damian at  Village Works on St Mark’s Place, before we all walked to Tompkins, recalling a city ever disappearing and reappearing in old poems and stories, greetings the springtime.  

Accompanying me, the stories of the past week -Stingo meeting Sophie, with all her wounds, of Alice moving to New York and exploring intersectional social movements, and Edward Said, reminding us of ways to contemplate our complex, excluding pasts, as we “accept difference without violence and hostility?”

By Monday, we all ran outside for the eclipse, visable from Texas to Maine, everyone was out with their protective glasses. How instructive to think about where we all are between the sun and the moon, what shadows are cast, what is obscured as we circle, through time. I remember listening to the album Earth Sun Moon after taking the SAT test in 1987.  A few cycles around the sun and it's my kid thinking about taking flight. Here in Brookly, the eclipse peaked at 3:25pm, covering about 90% of the Sun from 2:10pm to 4:36pm.

Rainy days followed, with more and more stories percolating.