The Ghost in the Well

It had been three days and I’d called three different “businesses” and a neighbor before I finally talked to a human who could help us. Vaimo was working and in meetings all day, I’d hit my limit on traveling to the nearby town to collect the daily 10 gallons of drinking and cooking water to be transported back home in a variety of plastic jugs. Reaching a human who might be able to help felt like a miracle. As I described the situation to Aaron, praying my phone wouldn’t cut out as I shared what was going on with our water situation in the house, he ended the call by saying, “Well, just so you know, worst case scenario you’re looking at probably $4500 if the pump is dead and you need a new tank.”

“No problem.” I confidently responded. It’s amazing how going without running water in the house for two nights had already moved me into a desperate state. No haggling for me. Just get this water working in my house again please. Months into the pandemic the situation was urgent for the typical reasons, and because my hermanita was coming to visit. We had to get this situation figured out before she came to the ChicFinn Cottage. How would I tell her, “sorry Kyns - we’re bathing in the lake until further notice?” She was coming for a month-long retreat to get away from what felt like a worsening covid situation in Houston, TX. Ah, how worse is always so incredibly relative.

For those not familiar with a country lifestyle in Minnesota, many rural homes use a well that is drilled near the home for the water needs of the house. The true worst, worst case scenario is that your well goes dry. Not like I am any sort of expert in these matters. Though I do know drilling a new well would be more than the nearly five grand quote we’d been given. After talking on the phone I’d been instructed to send some pictures to Aaron of our pump and tank set up. “Do you by chance have an iPhone?” I asked hopefully. He did, thankfully, so I would be able to text him a photo using our wifi connection to send an iMessage. Images on our cell network otherwise are very unreliable. Turns out, that country lifestyle reality is more manageable than the lack of running water even though we live on a lake. As I went out the front door to find what I assumed was our well, I sent the pic to Aaron trusting he would tell me if it wasn’t right. I did the same down in the utility room, taking pictures of things near our water heaters in hopes this was what he needed. Upon seeing our set up Aaron called back and said he would be out later that day. He’d felt badly for how long we’d been without water. And, as his dad would tell us later, the size of our tank and the concrete floor in our utility room indicated that we seemed like a household who would be able to pay for the needed service, labor and parts.

That revelation has tugged at my curiosity for quite some time. It calls to mind the ways people have made assumptions about where we live; our neighborhood. When Vaimo shared with her new colleagues at the organization she works for that she found a home in the Erhard hills, they asked which side of town we were on. The way they asked, inherently created a division by which there was a right or wrong answer to that question. Are you east or west of Erhard they’d say? On the one hand, marking one’s location in a rural setting by directional points, county highways, and other landmarks is part of rural community culture. We are the “Ah yeah, we’re just four miles southeast of the Schoolhouse,” or “yep, north of 22, or “no, not that lake,  the next one over” kind of people now. And, though we live on a lake, the community referenced by our postal code is not particularly affluent. Our side of the county hosts known white supremacist groups. Our community is on the “wrong side of the tracks” though no railroad moves through our “neck of the woods.”

Aphorisms and metaphors shape how we make meaning of the world around us. And, these aphorisms, allegories and metaphors are culturally rooted and are never neutral. I’ve been trying to cut “neck of the woods” out of my turn of phrases because of its origins and the ways the phrase harkens back to the manifest destiny processes of US white settler colonialism. I reflect on my role as settler and work to reflect different ways of defining my relationship to the spaces I inhabit. But what happens when we don’t give any thought to the ideas, preconceived notions, stereotypes, or assumptions, people hold about other people and/or places? I suppose then we remain complicit in upholding the structures of our lives that keep some people welcomed and belonging, and others Othered.

In Brown Tide Rising Otto Santa Ana’s scholarly investigation of “Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse” he painstakingly scours decades of mainstream media portrayals of Latino people and parses the narrative and metaphorical framing of our presence in communities to analyze the impact of these narrative tactics. While he is located in California, and he uses what are now somewhat aged, yet still relevant, examples of policy proposals like Prop-187 as central to his analysis, the narrative frames and metaphors used to discuss and understand Latinx folk continue to function in similar ways today. In the case of Santa Ana’s work, he specifically engages how political metaphors operate in our imaginations, transmitted through mainstream media sources, as to how public discourse frames topics like immigration, the U.S./Mexico border, or even the nation itself to negatively construct notions of Latinx people. Water as metaphor represents the unruly ways in which Latino immigrants are written or talked about by mainstream political writers, commentators, and politicians. Drowning, tides, immersion, porous borders, flooding, torrents, clouds, waves, rivers become metaphorical ways in which to couch anti-Latinx sentiment by predominately white communities. While I’m focusing on water here for the moment, due to the water problems in my own house, Santa Ana also explores how the nation as “house/home” is another frame we might use to see how metaphors are used to describe Latinx people and the fraught claims to citizenship and belonging in US mainstream media. As I continue to uncover the ghosts in my well, I look to scholars like Santa Ana who have revealed how metaphors related to criminality and disease additionally shape the public imagination related to describing Latinx people’s (unwelcome) presence in the US.

Given my deep interest in the ways these narratives function about Latinx people (one day I swear that book of mine on this exact topic will come out), my emotional well has run dry, so to speak, on the ways people continue to use language to oppress. When local politicians invoke “sanctuary cities” to gain political capital with conservative constituents, they are using a long history of metaphors to link Latinx people to criminality, disease, and tidal waves of problems. As Toni Morrison stated in her Nobel Prize for literature acceptance speech, “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.” We each have a responsibility to call attention to the way that language harms, separates us, and oppresses some, no matter the messenger. Because our language is metaphor (words symbolize things which then have deeper meanings) metaphorical harms abound when metaphors shaped by white supremacy reside unchecked in our minds.

When Aaron finished the four hours worth of labor replacing our tank and pump motor for our well, he shared that it either gave out on its own, or more likely it was struck by lightening. We had water flowing to the house again, and with better water pressure than we’d ever experienced since buying our home in 2017. Metaphorical ghosts abound, and now our pipes overflow. Metaphors may harm, but they can also heal. We have poetry to thank for that. Let us all go forth swift as lightning, catch lightening in a bottle, be a lightning rod at lightning speed for the change that disrupts metaphors of harm and instead seeks ways for our turn of phrase to be brilliant poems of healing.

What I’m Reading

Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell
I'm currently working my way through the art exhibition catalogue accompanying the retrospective by the same name that debuted at the Vincent Price Art Museum in 2017. I visited LA while this show was happening, but I was on the westside of LA and I didn’t make it to the other side of the city to see this show. A huge regret, and I hate regrets! This is the next best thing to the show, and in some ways maybe even better in terms of all the additional context reflecting on Aguilar's work that you can read at your own pace, comfortably from your own home. Reading these essays before bed has me dreaming of writing a play filled with all the queer Chicanx artists coming together for some larger purpose. Laura Aguilar’s work pushes me to think about my body differently, and my place in space. Her photography highlighted in this catalogue is evocative of the ways Chicana feminist scholars push genre boundaries. I’ve loved learning more about the late Aguilar and her work these last couple of weeks.

What I’m Hearing

White Picket Fence Podcast Host Julie Kohler examines the historical construction and contemporary manifestation of white womanhood in this very well-done take on the ways white femininity and white womanhood is a cornerstone of white supremacy. For those who wonder how that could ever be true, this is the podcast for you! The first few episodes have featured some very insightful women academic guests (mostly but not all historians) and I love how the work is pushing for more walking and less talking. Pair this listening with Layla Saad’s Me and White Supremacy workbook and you are bound to gain deeper understanding of how racial hierarchies function in our lives.
 

Artist Offerings

• Anytime someone’s referencing Gloria Anzaldúa I am all in which is how I stumbled upon this virtual exhibition at MCASD -  To Tame a Wild Tongue: Art After Chicanismo
• In other big Chicanx Art news - the Smithsonian exhibition running through August of next year exploring Latinx printmaking looks glorious. Check out this excerpt from the catalogue accompanying the exhibition- ¡Printing the Revolution!: The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now
• On thinking critically on museum and curatorial practices, this interview with Helen Molesworth is insightful.
• Reflecting further on how nothing is neutral, this article on the Racist History of the Painter’s Palette has me in my feels about my paints, and lastly
• for tools on challenging these histories these cards designed by Lesley-Ann Noel hold promise for deeper impact on critically thinking through design theory and practice.

Creative Ritual

This has been a very packed couple of weeks and when I look back on my Passion Planner I am really impressed with all I’ve managed to squeeze in given the hurdles of pandemic life. As I finalize the nine 4x4ft paintings I am exhibiting in January at a Minnesota gallery, I am happy to report I’ve finished painting #7, am this close to finishing its cross-stitch element which means it will be photographed and up on my website soon. I’ve begun #8 and am deep in the preparation stage for #9. This last month has taught me a lot about protecting my time so that I can paint, as well as just pushing through and painting when I don’t feel like it just to keep making progress so as to stave off a full blown panic attack. I’ve also been working on growing my artist CV which has meant I’m keeping an eye out for exhibitions I can get my work into. Over the last two weeks I’ve learned that I am one for two of juried show opportunities which brings me deep gratitude. I am happy to get the work out there and when "Dirty Laundry" is up on the digital exhibition space, I will be sure to share with you! Speaking of my work circulating - my People's Choice Award winning painting "Portrait of a Lesbian Marriage" is featured in the catalogue for Honoring Stonewall Exhibit from June 2019. I just learned the book is heading to the printers this week, you can preorder a copy here. 

Questions to Ponder

Is your well running dry? Are your pipes overflowing? 
What are you watering in these times? 
Where does your favorite turn of phrase come from? What deeper meanings are behind it?
If lightening struck twice, where would you want it to land? What are you doing to create the conditions for that to come to pass? 

Thanks for journeying with me. I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time. 

-KCF

PS: Thanks for reading all the way to the end! Want to support the work, I just started a Ko-Fi page where you can help support this and my other artistic work. Check it out if you're feeling supportive! I'm looking forward to continuing to shape that space where readers like you can help fund this creative output, while keeping the sharing of knowledge accessible for everyone.