On Places That Vanish

Baltimore(Day 2)

Our guide, Charlie, is a nostalgic. Though saying it like that might give you the wrong impression. Yes, the man does love the city -- loves it with an incredible love; and yes, he remembers its past -- remembers it beyond his own memory. For when he tells you about Baltimore in 1862, it's as if he is talking about his childhood (oh this house used to be so wonderful then, the windows were draped in red, and it smelt of grandpa’s cigar). But Charlie’s nostalgia isn’t the kind that is content to just daydream. There is serious knowledge underpinning it; academic degrees too; and years of struggle that have been worthwhile, that have seen parts of the city change for the better. And also, behind the nostalgia is a pragmatism that doesn’t waste time being optimistic about the bits of the city that are slowly dying, and that cannot be stopped from dying. Though this is what fascinates me – just the fact of it - that sections of a city can die, and can begin to vanish.

I have seen places like Baltimore before – but they were never cities. Last summer I found myself driving around Jamaica and visiting villages tucked away, behind the red bauxite roads. The new industrial roads exposed them, but they had always been there, deep in the mountains of St. Ann. And some of these villages had fancy names like Alexandria or Thebes, as if they once had the ambition to be somewhere worth mentioning. But their names were a mockery, for I understood then that villages (just like people, and just like entire species of animals) die. To drive through the vanishing villages of Jamaica was almost the same as sitting by the bed of your uncle whose skin has turned grey, who is now on a high dose of morphine. The dying has already set in; you cannot stop it.

In those mountain villages in Jamaica, there were houses that no longer had people to live in them. Perfectly good houses -- but they were boarded up and had begun to rot. And this is what West Baltimore is like. Boarded up houses. Emptied. Dying. The statistics are staggering. 15,000 empty houses in the city. I thought before that the problem of urban centres was ALWAYS overcrowding. People living on top of people; everyone living on top of diseases. I never knew before that those people could just up and leave with no one else to move back in - the city, waiting on a population that is never coming.

I cannot think about Baltimore without thinking about the villages in Jamaica that so moved me – that made me nostalgic, that made me remember them beyond the thirty year limit of my memory. One day soon, I want to write a book about them – these villages that are not only tucked away in the mountains, but that will soon be buried there, to be discovered maybe a thousand years from now by a bright archaeologist. And I imagine in this future that someone will be surprised, just as those who walk around any excavated temple or palace is surprised, that entire places really do vanish, going deep down under the earth like the rest of the dead. I’m not asking for these villages to come back or be renewed or be gentrified (if villages, like rotting cities, can be gentrified). I just want to write a proper eulogy for them – and to say that the things that will be buried with them, those little bits of our culture – anansi stories, rolling calf stories, the recipe for dukkunu, a real nine-night service that doesn’t become a street-dance complete with tall loud-speakers stealing electricity from JPS – it isn’t foolish, or backward, or unhealthy to be a little sad that they are going the way of the villages.

I’m glad that Charlie is here to be sad for Baltimore -(not wailing in sackcloth and ashes, not histrionic or anything, just a little bit sad) - for the parts of this city that are vanishing. I am glad that he is here to mourn the crumbling Victorian architecture, the cornices, the high windows. I want to be sad for it too, but I can’t really. Because these bits of concrete suddenly seem to me, no more real than the other things I’m thinking about – the bits of peasant culture that we let die every day. Part of me feels that cities ought not to protest their deaths, for the life of every city has caused the death of a hundred or so villages. And that’s just the way of things, goddammit. Places die. They vanish. Everything that rises, falls.

-Kei Miller

Memorials, grieving, transcendence

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania -- Spring hasn't quite arrived here, so the trees stand bare, the sky is more gray than blue, and a biting wind whips across the fields as we visit significant sites in the Battle of Gettysburg. It's Monday, and Gettysburg National Military Park is quiet and uncrowded. Our guide, the historian Peter Carmichael of Gettysburg College, is energetic and emphatic, helping us to locate our positions on maps of the battle and to visualize troop and artillery movements across a landscape of gently rolling knolls and ridges just starting to return to their usual green. Occasionally we stop to read from the correspondence of Civil War soldiers and their families, reconstructing the stories of individual men who experienced the gruesome battle. We are suddenly brought down from the god's-eye perspective of history into smoke, dust, and blood.

The battlefield is peppered with memorials commemorating soldiers, divisions of infantry, and important events. Statues stand in heroic poses -- charging, standing ready, or gazing at the terrain -- already contributing to a narrative of glory and redemption. The serenity of the park belies the political wrangling that determines what is to be memorialized, how, and where. There is much talk of the "presentation" of history, the official master narrative versus the smaller and quieter individual narratives of the war.

In the afternoon conversation with Peter and his colleague Kent Gramm, a question arises: Is redemption, the quest for transcendence, a typically American impulse that underlies the memorialization of catastrophe? This leads to a discussion of how history is often beautified to facilitate understanding and transcendence. History's eventual form is mythology, and myths are notoriously difficult to revise once they have acquired an authoritative, definitive patina.

There is a need to articulate pain, to speak it, to tell its story, as a way of making sense of inchoate tragedy. At a wake for a loved one, the bereaved are compelled to tell the story of the death to visitor after visitor in a key part of the grieving process. Then the grieving ends, becomes memory, and the story starts its slow hardening into myth. Peter's project seems to be to slow down the process to speckle, streak, and texture the narrative before it sets. He understands that it might already be too late, and that his lone voice might be just that -- an echo across a quiet field whose horrors have already been laid to reluctant rest.

--Vicente Garcia Groyon

Meanings & Monuments

The thing about being cynical, or at least performing cynicism for whatever reasons we perform it (I think for me it is an attempt to balance out what, at heart, is a desperate optimism) is that it has a way of coming back to bite you – and very quickly too. Like karma on crack. So when I watched all the reports of the last disaster to hit my little corner of the world, and I watched artist after artist rushing to the Caribbean, to Haiti specifically, and tweeting and facebooking and blogging about their breaking hearts, I admit it now -- I rolled my eyes. I said to myself then, affecting the utmost contempt: I guess this is some new kind of industry -- ‘disaster tourism’. I know too well, as an artist, that we are all so full of elegies. We are almost constipated with them. And so we wait for the next event, the next tragedy that will so move us that we can pour our elegies into. You won't catch me doing that, I had thought smugly.

How could I guess then that a few months later I would be invited here, on this two-week tour of Gettysburg and Baltimore and New Orleans and Birmingham, Alabama and Washington DC. The stated remit? To consider how places have faced disasters and how they have tried to bring themselves back from it.

Of course, of course, I’ll try to justify my own excursion, however weakly. I will say, this isn’t a messiah mission at all; it's not promoting, in equal measure, the desperation of the survivor and the heroism of the rescuer. And neither is this a tour into a landscape full of rubble and news-cameras (Hey! Get a picture of me writing a poem on the stone of a crumbled building! Hey! Get a picture of me crying over a body just pulled from the ashes! Come, get this on film, my artistic heart breaking beautifully). No. There are no fresh bodies here. The cameras are gone. Some of these disasters that we will be looking at happened more than a hundred years ago. Still the land tries to recover, or even tries to forget. And yes, still artists try to re-imagine and make sense of it all.

We walked through Gettysburg park today, that massive, sprawling battlefield of the civil war. The park seemed to me an incredible achievement, just as much a constructed work of art as Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. Both try to structure and make sense of the same awful event. And this park, while holding so many monuments, obelisks and equestrian statues, is itself its own gigantic, many-acred, monument. But I was completely taken by an argument that our guide, an eminent historian, didn’t himself share but was kind enough to share with us. So consider this: here at Gettysburg Park is a landscape that has begun to change. The changes are natural. New trees, especially, have been growing. The land is doing this by itself. The land itself is trying to move on. These new trees usher the park into another future; but they distort the park as ‘monument’ – as reminder of disaster. So they’ve begun to cut back the trees. To preserve it as shrine. Our guide is in agreement with this. But I think I am on the side of the trees who don't want to die as uselessly as the soldiers.

Perhaps it’s my cynicism come back again, but it all seems a terrific metaphor – for writers and their books are always destroying trees to memorialize something or the other. So here is one of my early questions: by throwing metaphor, and meaning, and monuments towards the suffering landscape, as if to structure it, do we help it to move on from its tragedy, or do we trap it in its mourning?

Kei Miller

Gettysburg

Tour of the Battlefield

The writers listen as Peter Carmichael discusses how soldiers fought side by side. Were they fighting as bonded brothers or was this just a great tactic of battle?





Reanactments

If so many civil-war buffs are reenacting the scenes from this war, has America fully recovered from this historical event? Is our continuing struggle with race relations tied to the nostalgia of this war?

America and I, two lovers in an out-of-town motel

It's always good to take a step back. To take a step back from one's life, like from a canvas, just a step or two to see the whole. The result is always surprising.

The moment I walk through the passport control at my hometown airport, I'm already gone. I sit behind a glass wall, still able to see those who saw me off, but I'm gone. All focused on experiences ahead of me. Because I’ve set off on a journey.

America and I have a gentle love affair, like two people who meet in an out-of-town motel, without any long-term expectations, but inevitably bringing out the passion in each other. I'm excited about coming again. There are so many familiar things about it, but again so many surprisingly new. The first couple of hours after arrival I feel like I've entered my avatar who's not fully functioning yet. Words fail me. Unknown things disturb me. I'm confused by proverbial American talkativeness, small talk at the airport, in restaurants, on the street. I look aside, quietly passing by people, not addressing anyone unless I have to, wearing dark glasses. You look so European, my American friends tease me sometimes.

This time I'm first greeted by a friend from Sarajevo, Dada. My country, and its people are devastated by war, and the only good thing that came out of this cataclysm is that today I have friends and relatives living all around the world. That's why I feel at home even in a small Philadelphia studio apartment I enter for the first time, designed in an industrial chic style, as I unpack my bag to take out the Bosnian gifts: music, cookies from our childhood, books in mother tongue…

America has once again surprised me with its well-known enormousness. The kitchen sink is as big as a baby tub or a shower bath in a small Mediterranean town. A parking lot I see from the train is huge, vast, the massiveness of the scene reminds of reality multiplied by special effects. Coffee mugs are so big I have to hold them with both hands, food packaging and the fridge are so big that I see myself as Alice who has taken the magic mushroom and suddenly become small.

The distances here are also huge. My friend says that something is within walking distance, and then we go walking for two hours. By the end of the day we've spent so much time walking through parks, cafes and museums that I feel tired in American proportions. Enormously. I say, If I had spent so much time walking back at home, I would have reached the end of the state, and I would certainly need to have a passport on me.

I'm looking forward to meeting other writers that I'll set off on a journey today. Socializing with writers always makes me happy as it is a kind of a membership in a club for eccentrics: I'm excited about a possibility of sharing thoughts with people who look on the world somewhat askew. We speak different languages, we have different physiognomies, our lives back home are completely different, but when we meet together the magic usually works and we recognize one another’s similarities.

In the days to follow, America and I will show each other our vulnerable sides, we'll talk about the things that hurt. I hope we'll also share stories of fall and recovery. A song from my childhood comes to my mind: Someone dreams of having a horse/Someone has a horse/Someone dreams of riding a horse/Someone rides a horse/Someone dreams of falling off a horse/Someone falls off a horse/Someone wakes up on falling/Someone gets up and rides again.

Beginnings

I'm in transit now, somewhere over northeastern United States. Arrival in Baltimore is still up ahead, as is New Orleans and the Atchafalaya Basin, and Birmingham, which held such sway and sadness over my imagination when I was a teenager studying the American civil rights movement.

I'm hoping to find "the things which no chart can tell us," as James Baldwin so beautifully wrote. For me, a Canadian, America arrives like a step-brother, a worldly-wise, belligerent young man with Harvard dreams, who calls you late at night and speaks wistfully of all that is slipping from his grasp but, in the morning, forgets to wish you happy birthday. We know him like our own (he sends a great many letters, his certificates hang on our walls) and yet he isn't. But that hasn't stopped us from reinventing his late night stories, and being proud of the home we've made which is also free, also grand. Like Vicente, I, too, find my thoughts pulled away to events in Japan and Libya, and I know those images and histories will continue to impose themselves on the places we experience over the next two weeks. It's Baldwin, I think, who is my beginning guide, who understood that "we must find the terms of our connection, without which we will perish." Through fiction and the imagination, he tried to examine the lives of others, and through this examination, this proximity, express something about the meaning of what we are living.

Full of words

Two things get me mentally ready for a trip: deciding what to pack, and reading about the places I’ll be traveling to. I’m still not sure what things to pack for the next two weeks --from university readings in Gettysburg, to formal dinners in Washington D.C., to visits to the old Jim Crow districts of Birmingham, to muddy strolls through the Louisiana rivers and swamps. In fact, the only packing decision I’ve made so far is this: no computer, just pen and notepad. The readings, on the other hand, have for a while now been taking my mind to Ford’s theatre, and to the Birmingham jail, and to the Lower Ninth Ward levees that, in August of 2005, gave way to what is perhaps the country’s greatest human catastrophe. It seems as though I’m leaving on this trip full of history and images. Full of words. What will I bring back with me, I wonder, in two weeks time? Earlier today, while reading a brilliant story by John Biguenet --a New Orleans writer we’ll soon be meeting--, I happened upon this line: “When one makes a trip, he comes home with stories.”

Eduardo Halfon

Three things before I start to move

Manila, Philippines -- Three more nights before I board the plane that will take me again to the United States. The schedule up ahead looks grueling: seven cities in two weeks to get up close and personal with America filtered through the theme "Fall and Recovery." Like many other non-Americans, much of what I know about the U.S. comes from the mass media, and this tour promises more of the behind-the-curtain revelations of my IWP residency two years ago.

In the last three weeks, my mind has been turned constantly towards Japan and the continuing devastation wrought by earthquake and tsunami. I have no doubt that this will color my experience of the study tour ahead, providing contrast and context. The images of whole towns and cities obliterated by a giant black wave remind me again that history is littered with the remains of once-thriving civilizations laid low by disasters both natural and social. In a bit of serendipity, a recent news story about the rediscovery of "Atlantis" references both Japan and New Orleans in the same breath with lost civilizations like Pompeii, Babylon, Ayutthaya, and Petra.

My first taste of America was New Orleans, in 1997. Perhaps it wasn't the best introduction to America, as its culture and ambience set it drastically apart from the rest of the country. But I found it memorably, rapturously alive, with an appealing darkness and danger about its edges. I'm not sure how my memories of Crescent City will be revised by this post-Katrina encounter. Our itinerary promises an in-depth look at the circumstances of the disaster and the subsequent recovery efforts, and I look forward to the education.

I've also been going through the material provided by the IWP as background for the tour, and I'm quite frankly amazed to discover that an attitude that I've sensed or intuited hazily about America actually has a name: exceptionalism. Given my ignorance of this philosophy, as well as my cultural background, I'm approaching the subject a little warily, although the more I learn about it, the more it seems to illuminate the things that puzzle most about America. I think this will drive much of the discussion in the days to come.

-- Vicente Garcia Groyon

Hello

Hello everyone, What a relief, setting this up was easier than I thought. I look forward to meeting you all in a couple of days' time! Natasa, this sign in has worked for me! Alice