I wanted to kiss the ground when I landed. The sigh, the relief. I don't know if you can go home again given the constant nature of change, but this place comes close. I too have changed, and not in all the ways I've wanted. And how is change received in a place that is largely slow, if ever, to change?
At home, I can’t get a package in two days. At home, the thing I need is given to me by a friend who just happened to have an extra brand-new thing. At home, it’s possible to have a beautiful place entirely to myself, and the sea’s temperature is always right, though most locals will disagree. To us it’s always cold. I’ve learned to plunge into the cold, to stay there a while, to rise up as something new, and be born again. At home, I don’t go swimming after it rains. At home, I can eat my favorite thing every day. At home, it’s too hot for clothes. I miss them. But it’s quiet enough to sit with life as it comes. I have to be here. I have to be present. I get to be. I want to be. At home, somebody knows my mother, knew my father, uncle, grandmother, grandfather, knows me. At home, I forget to consume.
Still, even here, I think about genocide. Words mean what they mean. Most people here make under $50,000 a year and can go an entire decade without receiving so much as a cost-of-living increase. Despite this, our governor recently gave himself a $50,000 raise bringing his salary to $192,000 annually. Comparitively, in Puerto Rico where the population is substantially larger, the governor makes $70,000 a year. Here, the people roared and he justified his raise. It hadn’t increased in years, he said. He kept the money. I wonder how else the people will pay. I wonder what happened to integrity and care and pride? What happened to love?
genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race.
In this world, it is commendable not to love, it is right to justify starving people, hoarding wealth, and criminalizing homelessness when there is more than enough to go around. It is okay to be ableist and justify fat-shaming and bully people who speak up because they want to be accommodated, considered. These things are all connected from L.A. to D.C. where the White House is posting pictures of predominantly Black men on the street arrested without due process. They promise Chicago will be next. It is not normal. It is not okay.
As this country capitulates to fascism, welcoming it by its silence, its pivots, its fatigue, I think about Sudan where cholera, entirely preventable, is quietly spreading, and an airport was bombed and barely made the news. Sudan has been experiencing a stage 5 famine for more than a year. The people resorted to eating animal feed and when even that ran out, they gathered and clapped and sang. And the world largely offers silence.
In Palestine where the population is also at stage 5 of famine, more aptly starvation, all of Al Jazeera’s journalists have been murdered. I can’t help but think of Mohammed El-Kurds’s Perfect Victims. He begins, “We die a lot. We die in fleeting headlines, in between breaths. Our death is so quotidian that journalists report is as though they’re reporting the weather: Cloudy skies, light showers, and 3,000 Palestinians dead in the past ten days. And much like the weather, only God is responsible—not armed settlers, not targeted drone strikes.”
And, I’m home, in time for hurricane season, after significant budget cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, responsible for tracking weather systems. Today the band from the eye of category 5 hurricane Erin sprays rain and wind across the islands, almost eight years exactly after two concurrent storms disheveled them. Power comes and goes. The generator runs, in and out. Still, I’d rather be here.
I can drive to the beach early enough in the quiet of the morning when it’s still free to enter, and watch senior citizens do their water exercises with the sunrise. Black folks everywhere. Good mornings sang in passing greet me, doors held open to let me through, I try to live beautifully amidst all this heartbreak. I treasure the tears, the words we don’t say, gratitude for empathy, how miraculously my heart has not shattered. We’re wasting time, it feels, and that’s the most sinister part. We all lose because we’re wasting time. Instead of loving, those in power are signing bombs and sending flag and muscle emojis in encrypted group chats for more civilians murdered, a job well done.
This president in this term has shown us that a better world has always been possible. If so much could be done and undone in eight months, then every excuse is rendered fallible, every inequity a persistent choosing, a willing ignorance, a coddled hand. But, we already knew that.
Wow…very deep sentiments Sai!
“I try to live beautifully amidst all this heartbreak.” A lyrical and timely offering, Saida.