Geographica

"Here are your waters and your watering place.

Drink and be whole again beyond confusion."

Directive, Robert Frost, 1946

Harsh, unfiltered sunlight on a Tampa, Florida street. The glare bounces from the asphalt road surface. Off street, stucco houses liquify in the heat, vegetation wilting. Google-gazing at the street where my sister lives, I'm transported back to memories of light in my Florida childhood. Grueling, merciless light. I think about how place informs who I am and how I behave. I wonder about the geography of anxiety, how physical place is an ineluctable part of one's psychic landscape. I ponder the difference between the vast United States and the compactness of the United Kingdom where I now live. I look for links between my interior map and the asphalt roads I've travelled.

I muse on the notion that my neighbourhood -- North London's Stroud Green--is much like the 'hood in which I grew up. It's downscale, the bodegas of New Jersey supplanted by wig shops serving a London-wide Afro-Carribean population. Lots of neighborhood delis, cafes, pharmacies and greengrocers. Charity shops offering goods both delectable and cheap. I fear the impact of a hideous development adjacent to the tube station,a glass and metal highrise development sure to bring an influx of yuppies. For now, though, we're safe, vulnerable to corporate marauders but not yet overrun.

Each place I've inhabited has its own memories, stowed all over my psyche. Some are tied in with the light of different seasons, fluctuating temperatures, wind, sunlight and rain. Others are rooted in the soil of relationships begun, continued, broken. The strongest imprints are from my early years in south Florida and over thirty years in northern California. Midwest memories of eight years in Chicago are less embodied. That middle American place didn't implant itself; it served as staging place between young widowhood and the chores of finding meaning in the years after loss.

Before London, California was the main event. In the Berkeley of the late seventies, I thought of matters not previously considered: how to act as a committed Jew (now I Jew in name more than actions); how to take care of my body; how to push the boundaries of what I thought I could do; how to cope with anxiety and not let it overwhelm me. The temperate California climate, it's translucent light, astonished me. Even now, I recall a California sky with longing.

But the very vastness of California overwhelmed me, the geographic and psychological boundlessness too much to conjure with. California is at the very end of the western United States. I could go eight miles from my house and step off the continent, into the huge Pacific Ocean. The Bay Area, as it's called, is surrounded by water, a force both fluid and confining. Bridges link the three main urban areas. You get in your car and enter a stream of people moving slowly over vast wetnesses. When you arrive on dry land, bright stuccoed buildings are set wide apart. No crowding on this western land, and not enough housing either. No lush greenery, but the ocean and lovely diffused sunlight and the belief you can be anything you want to be. No boundaries make it hard to know how far you can push the notion of self and not be in danger of imploding.

There’s pressure to fulfill one’s potential, be all you can be, overcome all obstacles to self-fulfillment. Such ideas are both a goad and a reprimand. How far must one go to become a liberated, self actualized woman of twenty-first century California? At times, I flagged under the unceasing demand to keep pushing myself to do and be more. In truth, I became a much fuller human being because I lived for thirty plus years in northern California’s limitless atmosphere. But now, I wish for less.

In Stroud Green, I have anchors and a sense of limits. The country containing my neighbourhood is about to make itself even more limited. If Brexit happens, the United Kingdom will be reduced to a small country in the Atlantic Ocean. This smallness will be felt acutely, the cut-off from the European Union not ushering in a new glory day for this island, but constrictions and shortages. I will not find this geography comforting. It will hammer my diverse, alive streets. I am deeply distressed by this. But north London is now my piece of the planet. As I move further into old age and begin my own shrinkage, it's an okay geography with enough light and space for now.

Rose Levinson

The Stones You See

Report on Zimbabwe's Cyclone

Meeting with the survivors and examining the rubble covering the residential places where homes were destroyed and lives were lost was heartbreaking. Most of the survivors are failing to cope with the trauma. Whilst several humanitarian organizations are distributing aid and offering counseling services,  the interventions  lack proper coordination.

There are so many people needing help who are left neglected. Some are drowning their pain and sorrows in abusing drugs and alcohol. At one of the shelters we visited, most of the young men and women including some elderly folk were heavily drunk. Women and children comprise approximately 80% of the people who died or are still missing. They were either swept off by the floods or  covered in mudslides that were subsequently covered by huge stones which emerged from the ground as top soil layers had been swept off by the unusually heavy rains.

Most painful is  that the two places extensively impacted were settlements  erroneously set up by the city council in places well known to be waterways. These places had been designated as unfit for human settlement during the colonial era, However, after Zimbabwe attained independence in 1980, the local city council authorities disregarded these regulations and proceeded to permit residential building there. All the houses along the two waterways were wiped out and most of the residents were either swept off into the ocean or severely injured. A few survivors remained with absolutely nothing--food, shelter, clothing all gone. All that remains are the huge stones covering the place  they used to call home. 

Sophie Chirongoma, July 2019

A Song of the South

The road is never straight, the way is seldom clear. I went to Savannah, Georgia, to take part in a Jewish wedding. I ended making a journey to America’s racist past--and present. In 1790’s Georgia, the 13th and last British colony (the name Georgia is after King George), enslaved persons were thirty-five percent of the state’s population. Over the course of forty-eight years, Savannah was an integral part of trading in people. Toiling as urban slaves, those human beings, from both Africa and the Caribbean, enabled Savannah to prosper. Though the United States Civil War (referred to by some die-hard southern nationalists as the War of Aggression) ended most physical slavery, the psychic wounds continue one hundred fifty years later. In 2019, I am reminded of that part of my American psyche bound up with the story of enslaved human beings in the country in which I was reared.

The reminders come from a tour around Savannah, led by a passionate African-American who insists that slavery cannot be forgotten. I see squares where blocks of up to four hundred humans were sold . I look at carriage houses in which humans were locked in after their day’s work. In one of Savannah’s most beautiful parks, I gaze at a statue of an unrepentant Confederate soldier. At the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum, I stare at a wood and plaster replica of a 1960’s lunch counter, complete with a seated African-American awaiting a cup of coffee that never comes. Looming over him, arms crossed and pistol at hip, stands a law enforcement officer. An audio of a waitperson informing the seated man he is not welcome plays in the background. She is shouting insults.

Observing present day Savannah as an outsider, I note that Blacks and Whites move in equal but separate spaces. African-Americans have full access to public places, but it feels as though ‘separate but equal’ still prevails. Two parallel non-intersecting tracks,with an occasional nod or conversation between individuals and groups. The predominant sense is of separation, an agreed upon boundary which keeps people from seeing themselves as part of the same neighborhood, let alone the same nation.

A Savannah resident remarks on the city’s bigotry, suggesting one can quadruple the normal racial tension in any other city and have an accurate gauge of what racial life is like in Savannah.

I don’t live in the US now. Its wounds impact me less than when I lived there, and felt, even in incredibly open northern California, the profound racism which is as much a part of the American psyche as motherhood and apple pie. It’s hardwired into the US citizen’s brain. One of America’s premier African-American intellectuals,Toni Morrison, writes “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” In one of her many brilliant books, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, she argues that every white American carries a shadow Black person in their interior. It’s an Other upon whom one can locate inner savageries too difficult to own up to in oneself.

I was a young woman in the Civil Rights era, the days when Martin Luther King made his clarion calls for racial equality, when young people came from all over America to march against segregation, when too many died trying to break apart America’s insistence that Black lives don’t matter. Sure, we had a Black president in Barack Obama. But that was an anamoly. In today’s climate of exclusion and hatred and racists at the highest levels of government, including presidential, it feels like nothing has really changed and that Black lives still don’t really matter.

……………….

Rose Levinson, July 2019