November 2018: Try To Praise The Mutilated World
In the fall of 2003, I studied abroad in Madrid. One of my classes was on Caribbean literature. On the first day of class, the twelve or thirteen students came into the classroom and sat down. We waited. After about ten minutes of shifting about, swiveling to look out the window, debating if someone should summon the program coordinator, in huffed a bald man with tufts of white hair above his ears, a bushy mustache, glasses dangling around his neck. He put his briefcase upon the desk and looked at us.
"I am sorry your teacher died," he said.
Some of us gasped. He spoke in English, so it wasn't a missed translation.
"Oh, you did not know? Yes, he died. And they called me last week to see if I would teach, and here I am, and here we are."
His name was Eugenio Suarez-Galban. That tangle of syllables seemed to embody Madrid. He was puzzled that an American university would schedule a class so early in the afternoon ("How will we learn and also eat lunch? This is lunch time!"). He had us order books in English from obscure, small publishers, writers we had never heard of from Puerto Rico, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad. He would tease us and he would teach us. I don't remember many of my college classes, but I remember Eugenio, standing at the front of a sunny room, shouting at us about literature in a voice that sometimes lapsed into Spanish, cycled back to English, then dipped into Spanish again. He knew we had left New York in search of something and he wanted to deliver something to us, one Thursday afternoon at a time, the autumn that I was twenty one. Before the semester ended, he brought it copies of his books for us to take. They were white covered paperbacks, the titles in plain black font across the front, glossy and enticing. I took two of them, even though I was not fluent in Spanish. I would sometimes scan the pages for words I understood, wondering if I could concentrate hard enough and find the story on the page.
A few weeks before the semester ended, he started referring to January, to the spring term, and most of us looked at him in confusion. He stopped and looked at us. "How long are you here?"
"Just this semester," I said. The student next to me nodded. Of the thirteen of us, twelve of us were leaving in December, flying back to our New York, our homes, our English. Eugenio was displeased. "If you do not stay abroad for at least one year," he said, "then you will never really know America."
Last month I flew to Europe for the first time since that semester abroad, and I thought about Eugenio, his adage that leaving America would allow you to digest America. I was accompanying graduate students to the Frankfurt Book Fair for one week. We left on the day Kavanaugh was confirmed; at breakfast the next morning, I listened to a group of journalists at the table behind us, speaking English. They were from Australia, Georgia, and the UK. "It sends such an awful message," the British woman said. "It just reinforces what we see happening in Italy, in Poland." I could see the dark and damaging misogyny wafting from America's east coast across the ocean, rippling against the tensions abroad. The world felt darker still.
The last time I spoke with Eugenio was March 2004, the spring semester that I had not stayed in Spain to understand America, but had returned to my apartment, my creative writing classes, my work study job tutoring students at a public school in Chinatown. I was sitting at one of the candy-colored Macs in the back of a 5th grade classroom when I emailed Eugenio. It was March 11th. A series of bombs had gone off in Madrid, and I wrote to ask if he was alright. He wrote back the next day in a mix of Spanish and English: No hay mal que por bien no vegna. There is no evil that does not bring about some good, he wrote, because you have written to me. He shared that he was alright, although he had a colleague whose niece had lost an eye in the attacks. He asked me to send his love to all, and I wondered if he thought of me as still in that same classroom with those same students, just given a different address, a different country. What I hadn't realized is that it would not be the last e-mail I sent on days of tragedy to people I knew and people I loved. If I drew a map of all the massacres and shootings and bombings, I felt like they would start to cluster in this year, wave after wave of tragedy (and that's only including the ones I've heard about). Last week, the text thread from my mother: in one bubble, she asks how close I am to CNN. In the next bubble, I ask if her husband knew anyone killed in Pittsburgh. It's just an ever escalating volley of concern and sadness, back and forth.
I've come to doubt the optimism of Eugenio Suarez Galban's e-mail. To reach for the positive in light of tragedy makes sense, but the totality of his statement--that some good can come of any evil--is a platitude I cannot subscribe to, especially not in the face of white supremacy in America at this moment. I worry about becoming numb to violence, which started so long ago. To walk by the faces pinned to telephone polls and subway platforms in the weeks after 9/11. To go to a friend's birthday party the night of the Sandy Hook massacre. To order groceries after the Mike Brown verdict is announced. To send work e-mails the morning after the Pulse shooting. It builds and builds and builds.
A few years ago I lived on the top floor apartment in a building where a grandmother and her twenty year old grand daughter lived on the second floor. The grand daughter often practiced playing the key board, which she played in the room under the small room where I wrote. Her notes would waft up through the thin floor to keep me company. I would often find her out front of her apartment building, kicking a soccer ball against the wall in the small fenced in area you could barely consider a yard. We would talk about music sometimes; I told her about rock camp; she wanted to volunteer but couldn't get time off work. "Maybe next summer!" I said brightly.
That winter, my roommate heard from our landlord that the girl had gone missing, and after a week of being missing, her body was found in the Bronx river. I wanted something to hold on to, something to make it not true. I wanted the keyboard notes, the soccer ball against the wall. The day I found out she died, I went to the apartment of the woman I was dating. We were watching the Danish version of The Killing, episode by episode, pirating them from the internet. We were going to watch another episode when I told her about the girl, the keyboard, the soccer ball, the missing, the river. The woman I was seeing closed her laptop. "Oh, honey," she said, and she never called me honey. It seemed filled with pity, even though she was just doing the best she could. What kind of sentences was the one my mouth had just delivered into our undisturbed evening? What would it mean to sit vulnerable and raw with the weight of grief for an evening? I opened up the laptop and told her it was fine, I was fine.
To measure time by tragedy and to feel the compression of violence stacked on top of violence, what does it do to the body, what does it do to the spirit? I pray in the morning on my walk to the subway, forcing myself to look up at the clouds and the bursts of orange in the trees. I start the prayer with the word god and then I don't know where to go. The first line of the poem everyone passed around after 9/11: try to praise the mutilated world. It gets stuck in my head at times like this. Try, and try, and then other days, just stand on the street and look at the sky and let the weight of it all sink into you.
xo,
c