The Luxury of Mundane Things
Karen D. Taylor
Written in October 2003. I post it today in remembrance of the bombings of Afghanistan and Iraq.
In my house, in the morning. The new day pulls itself up through the glow that is as old as time. That renews itself each hour as Sol moves westward, shining through my windows. There are tapestries patch worked from antique Indian bridal clothing on the living room wall. One has slivers of mirror stitched into it and when the sun hits at the right angle, the glass shines like jagged diamonds, reflecting in some of the other mirrors that hang about the room. My furnishings are old, as in the chair I dragged off of the street and had upholstered in leather; new as in the candle sconces dripping wax; functional as in the blonde wooden cabinet that my friend Carmen designed for me; pretty as in the antique sofa covered in peach raw silk; and comfortable too. An infuser burns oil of ginger or sage, sandalwood or lemon.
I spend my time in this pleasant space. The floors and moldings are old oak. The ceilings are high with beams. And because I love color, the walls are yellow and lavender, magenta and rust. The windows are large and face east. All are hung with translucent shades to insure that there is always light in my day.
From where I am, on the eighth floor, on one of the highest points in Manhattan, the view is gritty and ugly, natural and wild: Highbridge Park is a fringe along Edgecombe Avenue offering, in the right season, a thicket of green that counterbalances the concrete gray of Harlem. The birds who live in the trees sing, and I am grateful.
My building overlooks the Harlem River. Across it is the house that Ruth built, and during baseball season I can tell when the Yankees are winning because the sound of Frank Sinatra’s voice comes over the loudspeakers. “It’s up to you, New York, New York!” and then the cheering of the crowd moves across the river, rising up through my windows. In many an October, the stadium becomes the site of a coronation: The Yankees become baseball kings (yet again), and are an American dynasty, their followers say.
This is the stadium where a year after 911, someone in Washington DC thought it was a good idea to fly two F-117 Stealths over the game, right past my windows, which began rattling as though they would shatter. I reached the living room in just enough time to see the jets cutting across the sky, their engines sounding like rage, two balls of fire burning out of their tails. What must it be like to have one of those machines drop a bomb on you? How does the heart beat, knowing that missiles whistling and booming will bring about death and chaos, and there is nowhere to hide?
My friend Carmen is elegant, fastidious. When I first met her, she was attired in classic finery, carrying an Italian leather pocketbook to match her Italian leather pumps, and a burgundy-and-gray floral needlepoint satchel.
“Carmen, what’s that thing hanging out of your bag?” I asked pointing to a tapered plastic tube.
“Oh, that, honey?” she said smiling, her pink pearl lipstick glistening.
“That’s my caulking gun.” As I stepped toward her to get a better look into the bag, she pulled the caulker out, holding it in her manicured hand, finger on the trigger, to make sure I saw the whole thing.
“You know what it’s for right?” she asked.
“Yeah, I know what it is, I just couldn’t see what it was in your bag like that.”
Other things in her bag that day were a hammer, a tape measure, wire cutters, screwdrivers, shims, a drill and a few doorknobs, nails, screws. A visual artist by gift and training, a carpenter by necessity. Can build a loft bed, lay ceramic tile, and spackle with the same poise as when she cooks rice and beans, and bacalao.
Carmen knows terror. She is Puerto Rican, and her memory of what America has done to her island is like a history book: From the US-sponsored machine guns that killed unarmed people in the 1937 Ponce Massacre, to sixty years of American bombs falling on Vieques to test their accuracy.
Carmen knows loss. She is a 911 survivor, but her godchild died in the North Tower. When the first building collapsed, spewing a torrent of cinder, Carmen ran down Cortlandt Street. The ash covered her. It was in her ears, her eyes, her mouth, her nose. And as she walked the six miles home, she could have been carrying her goddaughter’s smile in the ashes that lay upon her.
For many months after the attack, Carmen, who is ordinarily erect and stoic, could not stop her legs from trembling when she sat down.
“Carmen,” I said, after the first bombs were dropped on Afghanistan, “do you support what the government is doing?”
“No, I don’t. Nothing will bring anybody back.”
“What must it be like to have bombs falling around you all the time, Carmen? You were down there at the World Trade Center. Could you imagine living in a country where that happens all the time? My God. Could you imagine having stuff like that happen everyday? That’s the way people get shell-shocked.”
“I’ve thought about it,” she says, and looks like she doesn’t want to talk about war anymore, so I just sit there waiting for her to speak, which she does eventually, saying, “You know what you need to do with that table kiddo?” and before I answer, she says, “That wood needs a good cleaning.”
This kind of conversation is where I live, nowadays.
“Please don’t tell me anymore. I can’t take it,” I tell my friends, trying to censor their reports on what is happening in the world today. I get my rag and dust the masks hanging in the foyer: the ones I brought back from Senegal; the one Jeffrey gave me from Australia. And when I clean that one, I think of Jeffrey in Tel Aviv as he was leaving. Jeffrey is a musician. A percussionist, specifically: When he feels like it, he sings.
He was coming through customs at the airport, and handed his well-stamped United States passport over to the clerk. Jeffrey has played all over the world with famous jazz people.
“This is not you,” she said, hating the stranger he was.
“Yes, it is, ma’am,” Jeffrey responded.
(I asked him, as he recounted the story, “Did you look different?” “No, not to me,” he said. “I mean did you have hair or something?” I asked. “No, I was bald in the picture too.”)
“This is not you,” the clerk said.
“It’s me, ma’am. It’s me. Look, it’s me. I’m a musician. Please. All I want to do is get home to my wife and children.”
And with that, the clerk tore the passport in half. Jeffrey came close to losing his mannerly decorum and reared his head back, forming his mouth to say something foul, but the next thing he knew, he was on the floor, with his arms twisted behind his back in handcuffs, looking alternately into the rusty barrel of an Uzi and the eyes of its owner, saying, “Sir, all I want to do is get home to see my wife and children.”
The police took him into an interrogation room.
“No, I am not a drug dealer. I’m a musician.”
They finally let him go. I wanted to report the state of Israel to the United States State Department on Jeffrey’s behalf, but what would that have done anyway? The Israelis do what they want to do. Jeffrey said to me, “Do you know what those Israelis have to go through over there, Karen,” and it was not a question, either. It was a most emphatic statement.
“Nothing worse than the Palestinians,” I countered. Can there ever be a balance between having to choose sides and being horrified, sometimes, by what your side has chosen? When I was an African, when the Arabs and the Europeans came to enslave me, would I have wanted to kill them, or talk them out of capturing me? When I am an African now, what is it that I expect my oppressors to suffer? The tirades that I lambaste them with? Certainly, I want them to hear me, but if they do not, then should I shut up, cower and hide, or stand up, meeting their violence against me, with violence that I mete out? What is the balance? What is the alternative to resisting occupation and encroachment, and the bombs strapped to bodies?
In the morning, in the space of my kitchen that’s painted daybreak orange, the kettle whistles and I make tea with milk and sugar. I cover my toast with orange-ginger marmalade from France, and sit at a rattan-and-glass dining table, upon a rattan Queen Anne-style chair upholstered with mud-cloth imported from Ghana.
Across from the bread section, lined up in a gorgeous array, are some of the planet’s riches: piles of cilantro, stacks of sweet potatoes, celery, apples, oranges, grapes.
Radio station WBAI is on and the images that I tried not to see when I signed onto the Internet to check my e-mail and my checking account balance are being described in detail, and I shudder. I want to be ignorant. I want to be engaged in my immediate concerns about food, clothing, and shelter, so I turn off the radio, as if that action will make the world go away.
My son Siyaka is going away to camp. He will need gear. My son Chenzira is going into his senior year in college. He will need extra money to stock his kitchen in the little apartment he shares with his classmates. I chastise and berate him for being apolitical and uninvolved in struggles for or against anything. But then I reconsider: What mother wants to set her child up to be tortured, to be jailed for trying to create the world in his head in the outside world? This is what activists and revolutionaries do. We see an idyllic peace, ultimately, and expect the world to fall in line.
“Ma,” Chenzira says, “revolutionaries wind up in jail or dead. And they never have any money.”
I counter, “But where would we be without them?” A question so complex that it may be its own answer.
When I am thinking rationally, that is when I am not attempting to ignore the dread that we all live with when there is war, I think about the sturdiness of my door, and not for fear of burglars, but for fear of the State, which may send its able representatives to ring my bell or batter my door down, because I have violated some section of the Patriot Act or Patriot Act II by signing petitions or going to demonstrations, or for having on the door they seek to drag me through stickers from Amnesty International and the Greens of France and the anti-war campaign in Paris and the Free Mumia movement. Or maybe they will break in to find out what I have on my computer. Maybe the types of books I borrow from the library will cause them to seek me out.
When I feel like this I must hear either music or silence. Desperation runs me into the living room to cut the silence that makes my mind’s eye see too readily. This fear, based on the soundness of my door, is only unreasonable because it takes me a few rounds of thought, where I calculate the cost of more locks and locksmiths, to realize that the State can snatch me off of the street and drag me away, because I, along with so many others who I will meet, have the temerity to say publicly that we think some members of the United States government act like a band of terrorists, the murderous likes of which Al-Qaeda aspires to. We must ask the people of Nicaragua if what I am saying is true about this State. Or the people of Cuba. Or the people of Burkina Faso. Or the people of Black America.
And if I am interned, I can only hope that the guard assigned to me is not the military reservist/Pennsylvania corrections officer, who tortured Arab men by jumping on their fingers, making them curse Allah, eat pork, and drink alcohol.
I walk up the hill to buy ingredients for dinner. The Jumel Mansion — the oldest house in Manhattan — sits high on the northern corner. I look up at the watch tower where George Washington commanded his troops as they fought King George’s imperial attempts to keep this land something like an outpost of Buckingham Palace. I need marinara sauce, Parmesan cheese, garlic, onions, and ground turkey.
On this particular day, I get to see the stock clerk build a display of rolls and rolls of paper towels, which stands like a pyramid near the vertical expanse of cola that is stacked almost as high as the ceiling. Across from the bread section, lined up in a gorgeous array, are some of the planet’s riches: piles of cilantro, stacks of sweet potatoes, celery, apples, oranges, grapes. I, however, must watch my budget, and resist buying anything but the items I came for, remembering my mother’s words: “No matter how bad you’re doing, there’s always someone doing worse.”
An embargo — before the present occupation — that lasted from Bush to Clinton to Bush caused the starvation deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. I appraise the bounty before me, considering what it feels like to starve to death. I have been told that it is not a painful way to go. The weakness sets in and the little child sleeps, goes into a coma, then dies.
There are newspapers near the checkout counter, and as I attempt to avert my glance, by looking at the cover of the TV Guide, I cannot help but wonder how many have died since the war this time began. In the bank, waiting for a teller I watch a television attached to a column. It shows a picture of lines and rows of coffins draped in Old Glory. The dead inside of them are my Chenzira’s age. As much as I try to turn my eyes away from the images, I cannot avoid looking. The more I try to avoid seeing, the closer I come to the place within where a woman is crouched in a corner, rocking from rage and sadness, crying.
I come into my house and wonder if any spies have been in it. I let the CD player shuffle the five disks that are already in the carousel. Coming through the speakers is swing articulate enough to be a call for action: McCoy Tyner and Ron Carter propel the band forward on McCoy’s song where a chorus sings “love, love, love,” through many harmonic variations and textures, through a soft whispering of the words, to an outright command: “love, love, love, love.”
This provides no consolation, because I still see the pictures and hear the newscaster’s voice, urgent and angry, describing. It makes no difference to me that the men I feel compassion for would most likely despise me.
The Finite Logic of A Circular Equation — The link below is a spoken word piece that is, essentially, analogous to the essay. It was an honor to record this with Jeff Haynes on percussion, in his Grammy award winning studio, and Marvin Sewell on guitar, doing those effects
An Arab man — a Muslim — is forced to take his penis into his hand to entertain the American GIs who are also seeking answers. She does not have to cry rape this time, this Christian soldier. She is in control of who gets violated and how. She smiles from her depths. Her eyes twinkle. She looks pleased. Her family and hometown friends say that this is not the young woman they know. Her family and hometown friends probably think they live in a great democracy that courageously prevented godless Communists from taking over, and are now rooting out the Arab threat and Al-Qaeda, who have not accepted Jesus as their savior. I know the rhetoric of both religions, and if this is the way they manifest god, then I will continue happily in my atheism and will no longer feel jealous of those who say they have the comfort of faith, and their actions are ordained by a book of holy writs.
The people who know that happy-looking soldier, and the ones who think they do because she is a brave U.S. troop do not realize that she is, indeed, a low-level representation of what this country really is; that she is a participant in a complexity of depravity where money alone is the only matter.
She probably feels empowered: By her acts she comes as close as a woman can come to raping a man, short of jamming something into his rectum as was done to Abner Louima by another person in a uniform. As was done to Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu-Ghraib, but by other men. She’s in the Army now, “the strong, the proud. . .” or is that the Marines? But don’t they say Semper Fi? The young Black men, who were soldiers there? I wonder if they felt more American, as they maimed those Arab men in ways that our ancestors had been maimed. In ways that our brothers are maimed in America’s prisons today.
And some, when confronted with the true reality of what this nation is, claim to be up in arms, shocked, and awed that such an honorable group of American citizens, otherwise known as the United States military, would do such things. And why would these honorable people chronicle their acts by photographing what they had done to share with others?
No, the sharing of images is nothing new. Just the technology that allows for super fast, worldwide dissemination. When the technology was a rudimentary camera and a hand-cranked printing press, postcards of lynchings were made out of the photos of the same. The little Christian white woman smiling from her depths, enraptured with glee over a brown person’s misery is not new: The chronicles of lynchings show smiling women holding itty-bitty babies, pointing out the charred men as though that lesson was the most important of all.
And the other picture from Iraq that became commingled with the ones in my memory is not the most gruesome, but the most useful for me to draw certain parallels. The pointed headpiece reminded me of those men who rode in the night, inspiring D.W. Griffith to make his seminal film on the need to protect whiteness at all times.
In the photo from Abu-Ghraib, I could not see the face, because it was covered. And since I thought the hood was another kind of hood, I did not understand why it was not white. I thought that whoever had adorned himself in such a get up did not have sufficient white yardage to make a long robe with flared sleeves like what the grim reaper wears, so the proud soldier fashioned any old cloth into a halfway decent version of the legacy that he needed to be ever faithful to. And the oceans and oceans he crossed to get to his station did not provide a wide enough chasm to make him betray his legacy. I, however, was wrong: He was not dressed up like the Klan, but he did not forget. So he began, along with the others — the smiling woman included — to strip, defile, and pile the brown bodies high and deep across one another, like corpses in a mass grave, though the bodies were not dead, they were alive and had been placed in a spectacle that reminds me of the lingering and terrifying loathing that one human being can have for another.
There is no need to name a religion or race, a culture or place of origin, because the loathing that I refer to is the essence of all horror, regardless of who is acting horribly.
I am remiss, because I do not know the names of the soldiers, so that I can place all the facts neatly, in a pile like those living bodies that look like cadavers. The soldiers’ names are not what matter, really. And they had dogs.
The Nazis and Bull Connor were fond of dogs, too. And it is a known fact across all the nations of the world that stripping your prisoners nude is the first step in attempting to control them.
To write of the things I know is to function too fully in the moment. It means I must pay attention to all that is going on. It means I must come out of the haze that floats around me, because I want it there to attenuate my vision. It means that one thought leads me to another: I know people who have been tortured. They are and have been my friends. They were tortured by the teachers of torture. By the people who founded a place called School of the Americas, where the fine points of physical and psychological terror are taught to the willing, the depraved.
Through the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), these teachers of torture had time to study the mental makeup of my friends. Had time to surveil them, photograph them, tap their phones, cause their families to become unemployed.
The torturers chained Arnie to a chair for a few days, naked, in an interrogation room with a single light bulb hanging over his head (just like in real life). Because they knew about Arnie, the room was tropical. They thought the heat would break him, but it didn’t. They thought the fact that he was sitting in his own urine and feces would sufficiently humiliate him so he would talk to them about the Black Liberation Army. He did not, so he was imprisoned. He has never told me any other things they did to him, except when they would move him from one prison to the next, the torturers put him in shackles, made him lie on the floor of the van, while guards pointed a shotgun a piece at his head. He was seventeen.
The torturers left Safiyah in a basement room for a few days with cages of rodents that they would systematically open because they knew she was pathologically fearful of rats and mice. When I asked her how she finally got out of the room in the jailhouse, she could not remember because the trauma of the rodents was so profound, but she did tell me that she kept looking up at a small window, because she knew she’d get out eventually. They wanted her to testify against her comrades in the Panthers, but she would not. Safiyah found a way to sky up, and went underground, where she lived as someone else until she was caught and placed in prison.
I said, “Safiyah, you must write. You gotta write this stuff down. You gotta do a book.”
“Nah, if I write a book, then that means I will have to relive all of the things that happened. I’m not ready to do that. I’ve tried,” she said.
The police handcuffed Joseph as they arrested him for unruly behavior at a demonstration, then took him around the corner, where they took their turn pummeling his face and head.
When Felipe’s mother came to the station house to get him after he had been arrested, she walked right past him as he sat on the bench waiting, because she did not recognize her own son. The officers did to him what the other officers did to Joseph. I know a woman who survived a bomb that the state of Pennsylvania dropped on her house. She is Ramona. My CDs are arranged alphabetically inside the drawers that are made especially for them. I begin to randomly and without looking, pull five from their various slots, then I opt for silence, so I can concentrate on what will happen to all of us ultimately. A scenario presents itself: The heavy boots of soldiers assembling in the streets to ensure that not one word is uttered to engender the remembrance of democracy, or the need for it. Then, another scenario: The heavy boots of another type of warrior fighting for peace assembling in the streets to willfully and rightfully demonstrate that democracy will never be a memory.
Is it foolish to remain hopeful now?
In my arrogance or naïveté, I cannot decide which, I have proclaimed, “the only people who can stop the war are the citizens of America,” but how can this be accurate when many an American’s idea of reality is a plastic surgery show, a production showing a desert island with people back-stabbing each other, and a show with crying young women who aspire to modeling super stardom.
As it happens, the American nation is, in terms of ways to do destruction, the most technologically advanced nation in the world. And has the nerve to go to other people’s countries looking for weapons of mass destruction, while having the disgraceful distinction of being the only country to ever have used two on other human beings.
And the megalomaniacs’ desire to control how much everything costs, to control everything and everyone all the time, no matter where, is a powerful anesthetic to witnessing blood and viscera; or even an aphrodisiac for those who believe that it is sexy to be a powerful man with total dominion over life and death, when having all the money you will ever need becomes stale, uneventful.
I do not want to abandon my own attempts to remain as calm as a Stepford Wife. I wish I was gullible and comforted by the thought that the president is trying to “save” us from the Arabs, just as the presidents before him “saved” us from the Communists, but I know that the Arabs and the Communists (as uttered by the would-be saviors) are the same as pictures of clothing stuck to a blank paper doll. And because of my vantage point as a thinking woman, when I examine the historical record and the current state of affairs, I have no choice but to conclude that white American males who act as agents of power continually show themselves to be the most depraved.
When the bombs in the basement of the World Trade Center did not bring it down in 1993, plans were made to bring it down once and for all in 2001. Using the technology of aeronautics, using the planes as one would use missiles, someone flew into the towers, into the Pentagon, into the field in Pennsylvania. And, the fact that certain agents in the FBI had issued forewarnings that were ignored means that the events of 911 were allowed to happen.
That the events were allowed to happen is a testament to desperation. Desperation does not always look like destitution. It can also come from the heights of opulence, where it is well fed and tastefully outfitted sitting in a war room or a bourgeois mansion, murdering from afar. Desperation is the genesis of all war. Desperation is the genesis of all terror. It is not always hungry or unclothed or living in squalor. Desperation is not always voiceless, unlettered, with no outlets of expression. It can also blare across nearly every bandwidth the cunning Big Lie that its actions are honorable and in the interests of freedom.
There was a time, when African American people could sit smugly at their dinner tables, watching the trouble that white folks done got themselves in by going all around the world killing up people for no reason ‘cept money and what kind of reason is that? That day is over.
Because of Condoleeza and Colin and military men who are African American torturers, I can no longer feel as though the Arabs, if they were to take me hostage, would let me go, because they consider African American people to be either too insignificant or guiltless to be held responsible for the continued insults to the Arab world. I cannot be proud of the fact that there are Black people high in the administration, because they are shameful. They are shameful because they have no love for humanity.
The Earth is crowded with holes: The lands are full of craters that have been left by bombs. The shallow graves where the war dead have been buried are taking up too much space.
These are not single, recent manifestations of breaches of the ideal that universal respect should be accorded. These are replications of wounds amassed over time, where some of us have forgotten that we are us, or maybe some never knew. And as much as I think that the calm and peace in my house is going to sustain me, my heart knows that my thoughts are fraudulent and dangerous.
The chorus sings, “love, love, love, love,” and I put my boots on to walk in yet another anti-war demonstration, hoping that no one enters my sanctuary while I’m gone.
