Disclaimer: family & friends, I am doing fine now and finding a new home. Sorry if this story seems a bit alarming, but I think it’s important to tell it. I am thankful for the other interns here who have been amazingly supportive.
I stood there with my face wet trying to find a way over, a way through, a stone to hit the glass of the window so she would wake up, undo the padlock & let me in like she was suppose to. I had said I would be back at one. It was one. Then one-ten. One-twenty. One-thirty. She continued to sleep.
At some point it struck me: I had been through this before. Standing on a street silent with night, my body mapping ghost shadows against a big metal wall I couldn’t get through. This was the second continent that had locked me out.
Maybe it’s only right I feel that completely alone sometimes. That kind of blatant exclusion. Maybe some gates are dead bolted for a reason. I’m still trying to find this reason. I’m trying to quietly find a new home. I think there’s a need to turn the memory to metaphor in the meantime.
The first time I learned a different feeling for the streets it was a wet night in Guatemala. My home was at the top of a steep hill and the rain formed hard currents against my feet. I pushed my body into the awning of the doorway and rattled my fists against the tin until they woke. They had dead bolted the door by mistake. It took an hour, but I slept in the warmth of my bed that night.
I don’t own a key in this country. I am thankful it was a dry night. I am thankful there was someone for me to wake -even if it was my supervisor. I am grateful for my homes -wherever they might be, however long I might take those beds. But the moment when we lose what we depend on can be one of shear panic.
Accra is safer than some cities I’ve called home. But across the street Jolinda’s serves Kinkey, smoked fish and whiskey to men who are not from North Kaneshie. To people who are not our neighbors. So when I kept dialing and she kept sleeping I started shaking.
Risk is like wind, you don’t always see it coming until it knocks you flat. Screams in your ears and steals your fucking umbrella. A loose comparison for something that I can’t quite explain. How do you judge it? Fear may be as accurate as a weather vane when it comes to risk. We spend most of our lives surrounded by strangers, depending on our assumptions of how things are. How people are. In the end, it is usually those who know us who hurt us.
This story is not a tragedy. It’s barely an anecdote. The woman who failed to let me into our home told me I should just forget it. “If it happened twice, maybe,” she said. And maybe that’s just the constancy of violence. Maybe that’s the root of this recounting. It’s why I shook and wet my face with fear. It’s why there are large pieces of glass molded to the top of the fence, why the gate was shut with a heavy lock. It’s why near misses can be passed over with the wave of a hand. All this is familiar. And an hour on a night street is sugar to the ether of violence this world sees each day.
As we are currently observing “16 days of activism against gender violence”, a period of which marks the International day for the elimination of violence against women (Nov.25), World AIDS day (Dec.1) and the Montreal Massacre (Dec.6), I want to ask each of you to reflect on your familiarity with violence. How routinely do we see it? Experience it? How rooted is our fear? What has this done to us?
I want to dedicate these words to that wound of familiarity that I suspect exists in all of us, though differently in each. I’m not sure what healing takes. But I think reflection might be a place to begin.
Slam for Solidarity winners! From left to right: Alessandra Naccarato, 3rd place, runner-up, the Lady of the Hour (1st place, Miki Laval), and Michelle Dabrowski, coordinator of the Throw Collective.
