The Root of Porous Things
On confinement, desire, and the things that survive after everything is given up.
Last winter, after Dad went into the attic and saw the rot, repairmen came to patch a leak in his roof. This unlucky event, he learned, involved the failed installation of a device meant to usher rain water towards the gutters. He thought about the hands that performed the failure: His former repairman, an old Armenian man to whom he was a client for over ten years, who rebuilt the deck, painted the home interior, and remodeled the basement. It crept up behind him, the negligence, tripped up his typical line of thought, and shook awake a sleeping awareness in him – one familiar with things that slip through the fissures of routines and rituals that are, on the face of it, impenetrable. The past year came to rest on his mind, in which he made his bed, replied to emails, wrote employee evaluations, watched the news, serviced the car, called his cousins, scheduled checkups, drove to work, and pulled into the driveway. They began to taint, the rush of images, as it came to settle, that all the while, water sat dormant and ate through his roof.
The morning after he and Mom yelled with voices that cut into everything around them, he ate at the kitchen table while she washed her tea set at the sink. In their monotony a rhythmic quality revealed itself, perhaps through the chewing and the scrubbing, which inspired Dad to inquire about a wedding and whether or not she would attend. She replied with a curtness whose attempt at nonchalance was betrayed by the weight of its own breath: If she got back from church in time, she would. They continued about their morning tasks, while somewhere between the question and the response, a sunbeam broke through the window to make their exchange sparkle well enough that everyone forgot the cartons of milk and the bags of rice emptying out onto the floor.
From the elementary school through the neighborhood, the last bell rang as an announcement of things soon to come: Children bursting through the doorways with their sticky hands flailing as they raced towards their playground or their parent’s cars. Doors slamming shut, cars driving off, and sneakers burning against the blacktop. And there, one street over, wedged into the back of a dead-end street, a little brown house would remain. It was quiet inside, save the living room, where Mom lay on a black, velvety couch, underneath a wool blanket, her back to the room, humming and whispering. In response to that resonance, the eastern wall crumbled with the promise of a better place, where she lived something other than an upright life marked by heavy-eyed stares into empty fireplaces.
Dad listened to the repairmen explain his groaning roof, and his mouth hesitated the moment before he put his feelings aside. The Armenian man died the spring prior, and to feel raw about the errors of the dead was wrong. Have compassion. Take pity. He did the best he could.
It screams when I open to cry so I (sorry) brush back its hair and now I am pulled close and blown into. “I” as in: A baby blue shirt with a (sorry) lap to sit on but (sorry) without arms to bear the neediness so “I” as in: (sorry) Blink away the burning and glue to pavement slabs of gray unrolling one by one by one for it looking down for it and keeping deep in coat pockets for it to never intrude on today to make room for other things passing to (sorry) to (sorry) to (sorry).
In her essay, “Black Feminist Regard – as Ethics, as Aesthetics,” Aliyyah I. Abdur Rahman defines anti-black violence as a benefactor to legacies of abjection. To encounter wholeness, that sense of being “...distinctly and wholly made…” is impossible within institutionalized violences whose conditions are marked by:
“The essential harms of containment, of bodily expropriation, of curtailed movement, of inadequate sustenance, of debilitated and weary living … [that] define living in the afterlives of slavery’s proscriptive social death [and] haunt every relational instance in which a black person finds herself invalidated and rendered invisible” (The A-Line).
In other words, anti-Black violence does more than vacuously inspire the disregard of Black women and femmes. As a haunting suggests, it endures, ceaseless in its capacity to shape/re-shape the geographies that hold her in a hostile grip. And the violences that she encounters here are neither coincidence nor a consequence of her actions but a surviving and imposing response to her body: A vanishing.
The forgetfulness she then brings onto herself seems to be something other than self-erasure. Erasure assumes will, and her disappearing act cannot admit to the presence of agency. It’s impulsive, like uncontrollable shifts at mid-ocean ridges, like an overwhelm, being caught off-guard. Her coherence is in a constant state of compromise. Split between life and death, all of those things that once appeared real and lasting are pushed aside, to let in other things that seem to fulfill the hope of life.
Demolition of all that fastened to her, self-forgetfulness without a safety net, living death.
Crammed into the sharp wet of his throat were many tightly held things – the becoming of words: shapes, colors, clay, benches. They appeared to refuse the passage of time, but this passage was merely unnoticed, marked as soft as unlabored breath, as inattentive as the rise and fall of a belly warmed by a summer sun.
Before Aboy became the loss, taken by neighbors whose lust for his acreage made it possible to poison the suwa offered at a family gathering, he was the one who carried Dad home. Their land was host to crops he tended, knowing which methods would encourage a bountiful harvest. In the fields, he held the plow in place, willed his ox forward, and furrowed lines into the soil. Into the grooves the seeds were tossed, each flicking gesture leaning towards the hope of rain. And it was because of both the fulfillment of that hope with each passing season, as well as the realization of barley and millet, that Dad was as unsurprised as he was grateful that on the day he nearly drowned, swimming in a lake that the village marked as cursed, there were only moments between the time the water took him under and the time his father dove into the damned pool to take him back. And underneath a stretch of blue sky, in which Aboy carried him home, Dad rested his shivering cheek on an unmoving shoulder, his weary eye skimming through the trail and the trees that rolled behind them as quickly as they approached. When they arrived, Aboy laid him onto some soft, firm surface, his farmer hand gently cupping that frail head.
Another trembling erupted in her. It washed through the hallway just beneath her skin, flowed through the minute spaces of her window screens, and whistled out into the tune that was each of her mornings. It was something found on a beach, at the point between the shore and the wave, where salt water seeped into newly darkened sand.
Mom began to sound out her name to the recruitment officer, who wrote the letters onto an enlistment sheet before Adey stormed into the tent to sweep away her and her siblings. Adey, who knew the love of a violent man, was possessive and unrelenting in all matters that would regard her children. It was impulsive how she would yank those helpless things out of harm’s way, for the simple fact that they belonged to her, were her claim to the world and what made her life possible. And thus Mom would remember, after being pulled away from the thrill of being known as an Eritrean guerilla fighter, as someone who fought alongside her countrymen, who would have a hand in her country’s liberation from Ethiopia, who future generations would proudly regard as the spit to sully Western interests – after all of that, she would remember that she was the daughter to a mother who needed her baby. But as soon as that adolescent embarrassment flushed her face, she felt a relief trickling through the underbelly. It enveloped her without the threat of release. The memory of this holding would have her even after she married, left home, and birthed her children on American soil. She never set down the image of her one hand in her mother’s, the other wrapped around a pen she took from the recruitment office.
But before being blown through, before the rot, before the (sorry), before the vanish, I am brought back to an open mouth.
A cry.
A groan.
No.
The cry before the groan. Then a creak.
No one talks about the moment at which a throat expands to make room for the sudden riot that it knows better than to choke on. It opens without hesitation to howl and howl and howl, out and out and out, through and through and through. There is a softening, after the howling, which, again, no one talks about. It comes not only from an aching hunger for rest, but from an urge to pause – with awe, wonder, terror, and shock – at what it just made real.
For a second it was real. Before the leaving, the festering, the rot. Before the plug up, the (sorrysorry sorrysorry), the hand-me-down-future, it was
M mm mm i iii i iiiii nn nnn nnnn e.
When a cry becomes muffled under the constant blare of sirens, it becomes necessary to brush back the hair, because of the need for safe routes, because it is apparent that rot still aches for tending. To remain dutiful to its need is to bear the title of nobility, the reward of hands. And in an instance of the impenetrable, I am always, in every way, through all routes, brought back to those small pockets of space wherein the hands live.
For instance: I am in a cafe, seated in front of a large window, thousands of miles from home, but something brings me back to being seated on a rug, in front of the television set, my head resting on the inner thigh of someone who is about to braid my hair. Nothing could take back the care that fingers wove through the wire and wool, its evidence alive in braided rows that bent back towards the nape of my neck; oiled palms that graced my forehead. I look at photos of cousins and grandparents that are framed above the fireplace. They lay their hands down onto my shoulders with just enough weight to remind me of things that are malleable and yielding: Please take care. You are my life.
(This is what you say to me over the phone right before I say goodbye. The distance between us is the reason why each of my visits are met with a question of whether or not I intend to come back. To give you an answer is work. I grasp for words that are adequate, that satisfy both your desire for a future and my desire for time to prepare a better, more real response, for the next time you ask. But there may never be a right way to say the real thing. I never left. I may never leave. I am here, still disappearing, by those hands that do and undo, leave me unlaced in cafes and off-guard in train cars.)
This is all to say, until I am brought back into contact with the image of loving hands, back into that surviving testimony, I am spectral, nameless, and abstract.
But it is screaming, still. Blaring.
Still it was
M mm mm i iii i iiiii nn nnn nnnn e.
Before choking down rot, guilt, dying. Before the glory of an open throat. Before the knowledge of hands that love well enough to do the killing. Before I cried and howled and it was
M mm mm i iii i iiiii nn nnn nnnn e.
When she writes on desire, Alice Walker does more than describe an obsessive and engrossing affect. Her speaker explains that desire is something that survives, and that this survival is made possible through their ability to both “...transform into devotion…” and “...carefully [tend]...” (Seven Good Things). Thus, their response observes an assumption that desire alone is enough to propel one into a life of fulfillment. In other words, materialization is less a question about the intensity of feeling or the depth of fixation. It is a practical inquiry about what one wills to release and to make last.
There are many ways to respond to the yearning. The eyes can focus into its abyss or turn towards its less needy neighbors. The mouth can lend breath to its utterance or seal silence into its crypt. The hands can devote themselves to its careful tending or abiding neglect.
In a week the roof will be patched. The repairmen will pack their van and Dad will prepare his lunch with an acute awareness of the things that hang overhead. There must have been signs, minor events, that he mistook for ordinary things. The creaks, for instance. He thought they belonged to the floor boards, an acknowledgment that his weight shifted as he moved around the house. Had it been the roof? He spread jam over his toast while a dim light crept through an opening in his mind. It gave way to the image of where he imagined life began: At the back of a trembling head, held up by a hand that knows all of the tenderness in the world.
Mom hears the lunchbox zip shut as she reads Psalms in the living room and wonders if she is the only person of her kind left in the world. There was a time, she thought, when she could say those private things over the phone to a friend who lived a few states southwest or to her mother who lived an ocean away. But with her friend estranged and her mother dead, there was little but a couch to bear her weight. That relief became available to her, not through her waking life, but in those silences she spoke into the creases of a black, velvety couch. There lived sisters, daughters, and mothers – the kind of women who could talk to her with a potency that resembled a life, who made contact possible, because they were the ones who knew, and took delight in, all the things that turned in the making of her name.
At the arrival of a warm eastern breeze, the elm branches lean towards the lake and their leaves begin to unroll. That familiar orchestra of green spasms into several shades as the gust pulls them into and away from each other. They shiver with the thrill and repose of things that authorize their own leaf-licked surrender. And from my seat at a wood bench, weather-beaten by the years, where the foliage waves directly overhead, their gestures give shape to a space in my mind that bears deep reverence for porous things. My uncertainty aside of whether this capacity to be bled through is a blessing, a curse, something in-between, or something else entirely, my need for its existence is without question. It’s a need that delivers a twitch, bats an eye awake, exhales, and lives in the echo of warm eastern winds that blow through both elm and me. It brings me back to the foot of that yawning entrance, that terrible relief, that promise of possibility. And now, I think, this all may be nothing more than a battle, a confused attempt, to fight for and against that entrance.
In Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, young black girls retrieve themselves in solitary places:
“When Nel, an only child, sat on the steps of her back porch surrounded by the high silence of her mother’s incredibly orderly house, feeling the neatness pointing at her back, she studied the poplars and fell easily into a picture of herself lying on a flowered bed, tangled in her own hair, waiting for some fiery prince. He approached but never quite arrived. But always, watching the dream along with her, were some smiling sympathetic eyes. Someone as interested as she herself in the flow of her imagined hair; the thickness of the mattress of flowers. The voile sleeves that closed below her elbows in gold-threaded cuffs” (Morrison 51).
In her imagination, Nel reconfigures herself into an image of beauty that transgresses and transcends precisely what the institution works against her being. But whether or not she fulfills that dream – the fiery prince, the flowing hair, the gold-threaded cuffs – is a question that misinterprets the true nature of her desire. The scene gestures towards a value that Nel has already achieved: The witness. A set of loving eyes who recognize and appreciate the license, agency, grandeur, mystery and spontaneity that lives at the site of a black girl’s self-regard.
The victory is not only the waywardness through which Nel invents herself but also the fact that there is a participant – someone there to watch and respond to that unfolding invention. It may be impossible to become real in the world without someone who watches and knows who you are.
Works Cited:
Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. “Black Feminist Regard – as Ethics, as Aesthetics - the A.” The A-Line, 1 Aug. 2019, alinejournal.com/convergence/black-feminist-regard-as-ethics-as-aesthetics/.
Morrison, Toni. “1922.” Sula, Vintage Books , New York, New York , 1973, p. 51.
Walker, Alice. “Desire.” Seven Good Things, sevengoodthings.com/desire-poem-alice-walker/. Accessed 2 Mar. 2024
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