Cultural (re)Membering Through Memoir: An Outsider Autoethnography

“A story, we sense, is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.” Patricia Hampl
Erin Sharkey
12-07-09

“Culture” is defined as an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning. Or the set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterize an institution, organization of group.

“Ethnography” - A field study across difference.

“Autoenthnography” - “an attempt to see one's self as other might.” Susan Bennett or “an autobiographical genre of writing that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural.” Ellis and Bochner

Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, Bone Black – bell hooks
To me, telling the story of my growing-up years was intimately connected with longing to kill the self I was without really having to die. I wanted to kill that self in writing. Once that self was gone-- out of my life forever-- I could more easily become the me of me. Pg 81.

(The memories) came in a surreal, dreamlike style that made me cease to think of them as strictly autobiographical because it seemed that myth, dream and reality had merged.
“limitations of autobiography, of the extent to which autobiography is a very personal storytelling- a unique recounting of events not so much as they have happened but as we remember and invent them. Pg 83

Fiction and autobiography- Audre Lordes bio-mythography.
Reunion and release

Autobiography as hope chest- artifact, gifts for future. Safekeeping for another time.
“Mama tells us-- her daughters-- that the girls in her family started gathering things for their hope chest when they were very young, gathering all the things they would carry with them into marriage.” bone black, pg 1

“I see her remembering, clutching tightly in her hand some object, some bit of herself that she has had to part with in order to live in the present. I see her examining each hope to see if it has been fulfilled, if promises have been kept.”


There was no agonizing, screaming custody exchange in a target parking lot, we met on neutral ground. Curtis and Curt Jr. (the eldest of my younger brothers) picked me up in the Logan Square neighborhood in Chicago on a spring morning in March. I jumped over puddles after locking three sets of doors on my way out. They were standing near the car and Curtis wasn't as tall as I remembered. Curtis was wearing an athletic jump suit, over a t-shirt covered in shiny bullet heads. From this distance all of this looked younger than this 53 years. When I got to them I opened my arms to signal that I was willing to embrace them and Curtis walked in to them. It was then that the feeling small was all around me, I was on my toes surrounded my his smell. Up close I can see the years on his face and body. Curt Jr. had a little combed out fro and he smiled as he looked away, his gold grill shined in the sunlight. Curtis pulled him towards me and introduced my brother saying that he needed my advice so it was great we had so much time together on this road trip.

Curt Jr. is the only one of the brothers I might have remembered from over 23 years ago. I have a foggy, shifting memory of Curt Jr.'s mom and a girl that may be his older sister. He sits in the back seat.

We drive out of the North side neighborhood and embark on the 1 hour drive on the 94 towards Milwaukee. I had been fighting frantic thoughts, panic since I arrived at the airport in Buffalo the morning before. At the second toll booth I realize that I had an almost overwhelming calm and that I may have felt that way since my cell phone rang and I started the business of gathering my things to walk out to meet my father after a 23 year absence. It makes me chuckle a little to myself.

This car we were in, a maroon sedan, I start to suspect is not Curtis' car. He searched for the button to lower the windows like his arm did not have enough space, there is a feminine feel inside too and his knees are high on either side of the steering wheel. The conversation goes between talk of how much this visit was anticipated by a list of people I don't remember or I can hear them vaguely in my mother's voice, Curt Jr.'s problems with figuring out how to find work, and how my flight was, I must have answered how my flight was 4 or 5 times . I can tell that they are a little nervous. Curtis drives past one of the toll stations without paying. We past Racine about half way through the drive, this is where my mom's family lives, signs for Wisconsin cheese and Danish Kringel line the highway. Curtis says something like-- “you must know that place”, and I do.

The city comes up around us soon after that. And Curtis says that we are heading to my cousin Bubbles' 6th birthday party and my aunties are all there waiting to see me. We pulled into the Chuck E. Cheese's parking lot in a strip mall. I jumped over another puddle in the parking lot on the way in, Curtis holds the door in such a way that I need to duck under his arm to enter. In an instant the sunlight was violently replaced by lights chasing,and bells ringing with children's squeals roaring behind. For a moment, I know no one. And then over the din there was a scream, a yelp from the dining room and I am once again in arms and surrounded by women. Each was full of questions, each wanted to know if I remember them. Each looked at me from head to toe and back again. Each had stories to tell. I must have been at that Chuck E. Cheese's before although they all look the same.

My body is theirs. They touch me on my arm and feel my hair, a little spank and move my face from side to side looking for themselves there. I do not need to examine to see my breasts under their sweaters and the ridge on my lower back connecting my hips, the way my thighs meet. And the little things too, like the islands of freakles on my lips and nose. I may have learned how to move my body from my mom but my physical lineage was in this room.

There is a string of names I try to keep straight, try to match with that little stack of photos in my purse and stories mom has gifted me of these women as teenagers. Auntie Mae makes fun of me, asks if my mom is still uptight. Aunt Bece launches into a story about her husband like we are just catching up. Her daughter, my cousin Latoya cries a little, I am her missing comrade. And over that greasy thin crust pizza we try to fill in the last 2 decades. Curtis watches from the end of the long table, sometimes laughing to himself. My Aunt Gayle grabs my hand, challenges me to wack a mole. She explains that the family works together to get as many tickets as they can and then they let the birthday girl pick something off the top shelf, that way the party results in the present. We wack and then shoot hoops and drive cars without any real talking, some cheering and goading. Suspicious, my cousins Bubbles and Randy, watch us trying to figure out who I am.

Curtis was watching too, and he got closer, looked over my shoulder as I laughed and drove off the racetrack on the screen. He quietly told me my brothers had arrived and the finish line came up on the horizon. The twins, Joseph and Joshua, were 13 awkward as well as a little nervous to meet me, I could tell from the shifting feet. They were tall and lean, they stood shoulder to shoulder. Their faces were like a memory to me.
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“Facts can exist without human intelligence but the truth cannot” Toni Morrison- Site of Memory
Mixed women's autoethnographical exploration- ethnography inside difference
insiders outsiders inside look
Danzy Senna – Where Did You Sleep Last Night?
The journey to discover her father's unwritten and dismembered family history. And on this quest she gets to know her father and the forces of history as well as herself. On one moving visit to Montgomery AL, she takes note of names, complexion, hair, movements, voice, language, clothing, church.
“This was my black family-- the proof that I was connected to a large Southern clan who had not married out of the race or fled their origins to escape who they were, who were not tragic or lost.”
Catherine McKinley Book of Sarahs
Stacey Ann Chin newly published autobiography – other side of paradise.
Michelle Cliff – Postcolonialism & Autobiography
observated quality- He notices, she drives, she is the first human, but she is not.
“I and Jamaica is who I am. No matter how far I travel – how deep the ambivalence I feel about ever returning. And Jamaica is a place in which we/they/I connect and disconnect – change place.”
Lit reading by Sidonie Smith
Autobiography's legacy has been particularly troubling because of its identification with the western romance of individualism. In the master narratives of modernity, the autobiographical “I” has functioned as a culturally forceful enunciatory site of the autonomous, free, rational, unified individual or “self.” If this is true than what is a de/colonizing subject to do and I would argue that mixed race women trouble this notion as well. Can the masters tool ever dismantle the masters house?
What are the performative liabilities and possibilities?
“To take possession of the autobiographical “I” in a cultural context in which that “I” is normative, is at once to be possessed by cultural norms and to become culturally intelligible.”
1.rendering the “I” unstable, shifting, provisional, troubled by and in it identifications
2.if the autobiographical subject is multiple




The next day, Curtis took me on a tour of “his” Milwaukee, my brothers schools, important buildings in Milwaukee history, houses his mother lived in, the place we lived when I was born. We stopped at an old department store-- he wanted me to help him pick out a tie for church on Sunday, to show me where he buys the size 19 shoes. We walked the aisles silently looking through the clothes. A short gentlemen with his glasses on the tip of this nose, a measuring tape around his neck, calls out for him, tells him about the new shoes they have in, that he put aside for Curtis because he knew they were his style.

I am definitely on tour. We stop by Mae's house. Her laugh is so beautiful, like the sweetest cackle. Curtis lets her make fun of him, poke at him. She offers to teach me how to cook, quizzes me on soul food dishes. Do I eat collards, have I had real biscuits, do I know how to cook like black folks? She asked what my mom says about them, so I reach in my bag for those pictures. I said that she kept these for me and Mae snatches them up. There is glee at the sight her childhood. They are the funniest things she has ever seen, the most precious. Every picture she wants someone else to see, look at your big head, what were you wearing, what were we doing here. Every picture she repeats— I'm a need copies of these. She goes through them several times and her playful face gets serious and she said tell your mom how grateful we are for these. She gets up with out another word and takes me by the hand to her bedroom. There on her dresser is a picture of me, I was probably 5, around the time of that last visit. It was in a little gold frame surrounded by other family members school pictures.

At Curtis' aunt Jewel's house that same picture was on the mantle.

We go by Gayle's house. As we walk up the steps to the door, he says that there is someone here who is very excited to see you. The entrance way was dark and the house smelled like cooking, a little like grandmas used to. He calls out into the house, and I wait in the dining room for this someone. I hear her before she comes around the corner, my Aunt Bobbi appears and I wouldn't have recognized her if that voice had not proceeded her. She was twitching, her eyes looked everywhere but right at me. She was wearing a gray sweatsuit, and dirty socks. Her face was ashy and a sort of gray itself. The embrace was over before it started. My mom used to tell me how Bobbi was my safe place when grandma wasn't around on those visits. She was talking without breathing, rambling. She kept saying she knew she would see me again. She went into her bedroom to get something to show to me. This something was a little 2 inch square picture of me from 1985. It was yellowed and worn around the edges, it had been folded and stuffed. It was care.

The last stop of the day was to Curtis and the boys' little apartment over the airbrush t shirt business. We stopped in so that he could introduce me to the owner, who said don't tell me this is your daughter as we walked in. I have never had the sight of me announce- call out my parentage. He insisted on making me a t shirt, airbrushed in yellow and blue, my name in swirls. It would be dried and ready before my departure the next day. The twins ran up the stairs and Curtis and I climbed the narrow stairscase after, his full frame filling the space. The apartment was nearly bare, and smelled like boys and grease. We sat at the kitchen table while the boys gathered things to show me from corners of the place, a trophy from basketball, a report card, their school uniform shirts. Curtis' cell phone rang and after a few minutes of talking, he hands me the phone. I am not sure who is on the line and the female voice sounds friendly like I should. I look at Curtis and he says “it's Summer.” I remember from conversations with Curtis on the phone in the months before this visit, that Summer was Curtis' girlfriend and it occurs to me for the first time that she has not been at all. As if on cue, she apologizes for not being there to meet me, and says she is embarrassed to say that its because she is at the Women's Holding Center but it will be better for the baby that she stays clean for the rest of the pregnancy. And its a girl. I didn't know where to look or how to hold my hands. When I looked up toward Curtis, he stood up and went to his room off the kitchen. He emerged with a small black and white sonogram and handed it to me. And this woman I had never meet or spoken to before this moment asked me if I would give my sister her name.
Pictures serves not only as hope but also
Pictures served as safe passage
Pictures promised (re)membering and storying
Pictures suggested goodwill
Pictures kept safe by this white lady, as they had no safe place
Pictures as artifacts, proof

Argue that Autoethnography functions as cultural remembering but also allows for the autobiography to write the shifting self and the multiple self. Mixed women writing allows for an insider outsiders inside look at cultural and the borders around and the origins of those performative culturally markers.
Site of intergration, disintergration, and transgression.

The Hard Rock Cafe - MyBuffalo Photo - Where Buffalo Roams...Online

The Hard Rock Cafe - MyBuffalo Photo - Where Buffalo Roams...Online

Dannie

That summer we moved from the condo with the jungle wallpaper, to the house with ivy climbing its walls. At our new house, I found my best friend the first day. Cheryl’s house is two-doors down and it was the pale green color of mint. I think a short sentence simply naming Cheryl would be a good transition between finding my best friend and seeing her pale green mint of a house. Cheryl and her sisters ruled the block, and felt it was their job to look at the new girl in the corner house with the big oak trees. They road their skateboards over and over, up and down the sidewalk, in front of our house, to establish that they owned the concrete.
I stepped out from behind the lilac bush and collided with Cheryl. We lay on the sidewalk staring at each other. She had an overbite and dusty bare feet. She wore her Catholic school uniform on Saturday, and there was a sticky ring of something red around her mouth. She looked away and asked, “Why are your mom and dad white and you’re not?”

In my life, I have only ever been asked one question.

I was five when they got married, and I got my own ring and a new yellow dress. Bob asked me if he could be my dad. Bob has a big brown beard-- his bright white balding head was sun burned bright red in the summer. The day after my mom married my new dad they drove me all the way to Curtis’ house in Milwaukee. On his front porch, my new dad and Curtis shook hands. Curtis was my father, the biological kind. And this would be our last visit.

Curtis took me to his mother’s house, and I stayed there for many days. I remember my grandma braiding my hair in cornrows. I sat on the floor, hot in between her knees, crying because of the pulling. She wacked me for being tender headed. Later, thinking I looked like my aunties, I stared in a mirror tilting my head from side to side, to examine the lighter white skin between braids. Dannie. Dannie was my name at grandma's house. Erin was some white girl’s name.

She had big hands and a wide chest. Grandma had this amazing smile, warm and mischievous. Rather than looking like her, each of her nine children reflected their own father’s features-- the only consistent feature was that smile. I have it too.

Curtis’ father, Alvin was just one in a long line of men. Curtis learned early, the language to explain his own multiple fathers, absent fathers. His own temporary fathers. When Curtis left our new family alone, I imagine that he used those words: multiple, absent, temporary. When he did not go the last custody court hearing, his absence screamed.
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My new dad chose me and asked me if he could be my dad. Before the wedding, we moved into his condo off Grand Avenue. Its walls covered with huge green leaf wallpaper—it felt like the jungle. The smell of freshly made waffle cones filled the apartment, wafting up from the Grand Ol’ Creamery down the street. The woman upstairs had a dentist chair in her apartment and she let me sit in the chair whenever I visited. A few days before we moved out, Mom spanked me for drawing on the wall with a crayola from the 96 pack that I got for a wedding present.

After the wedding, Curtis was always there in the background. My blackness forcing me to explain that when I said “father,” I meant someone else, I meant my new dad, or my stepdad or my white dad or the dad I live with, because my father was dead.

He was catatonic. He was frozen in 1985-- forever.

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On my eighth birthday, a little gold watch with a pink face came in the mail with a Milwaukee postmark. It was broken when it arrived.

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On the Christmas of my nineteenth year, my maternal grandmother hobbled down the driveway, over the ice, in the dark, to give me the message it took Curtis fifteen years to write, “I have not been doing well, lots of heart problems. I miss you very much. Please write me.” Three sentences folded inside of a Christmas card with a cartoon Santa on the front.

An avalanche came tumbling out. My mother would not stop talking. She was only 22 when she met him: “He was good to us until the drugs, and even after the drugs, he loved you.” And she rambled on and on for days. That year, winter break from my college classes, was an exercise in hiding from her nervousness.

I did not write him back.

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Curtis was a big man, almost seven feet tall and hundreds of pounds. With dark skin and his hair in jheri curls--he was not heavy, just big. There are pictures from an early Christmas that mark the striking difference between his height and hers. Mom says he had to duck in doorways. He had a big car, wide and long, and he would drive with his knees, stretching one long arm over the back of the front seat. The car filled with the smell of cologne, free from the trap of his underarm. He drove to a park, and he put me on his shoulders. I could touch the sky.

When I look at pictures of them from that time, all I see is my mom. She looks so beautiful in those pictures, young and smiley, her long brown hair curly. Her olive skin is light against his. She is always on her toes in the pictures of them together.

I am not a Movement Child-- a blessed symbol of racial progress and an inspiration of a raceless future. I am a Disco Child. I was not born in the sixties, to activist parents but at the end of the seventies, to a disco club bouncer and a cocktail waitress. Theirs was not a political statement or a statement about unity and peace, celebrated in the most intimate way. I am not a movement child unless you are talking about the shake or the electric slide. I am a disco child, born to a soundtrack of Sly and the Family Stone and of the Fifth Dimension. Their split seemed inevitable, their love looked different in the daylight. Party drugs got him, speed and cocaine set his rhythm. The music they made was off beat.

Caster Runs for Me

There is a video circulating the internet, a video of people emerging from the darkness-- some with bright smiles, others more somber, each holding a hand written sign that reads-- Caster Runs for Me. It is a moving 3 minute video of solidarity, images of men and women standing in community with world class runner, Caster Semenya, who now has her most private life on very public display. Shot is Brooklyn, the video's soundtrack is the haunting harmony of Sweet Honey in the Rock's Beatrice Johnson Reagon singing the beatitudes-- blessed are . . . for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, they shall see God, they are the children of God.

There is also a video produced by the Associated Press, a video that is narrated by the reporter Diane Kepley. It begin with a challenge—“Quick man or woman? She, and yes, she claims to be a woman.” Her flippant tone speaks over the images of a young woman, 18 years old, smiling from ear to ear, celebrating a victory. Diane Kepley then issues another test-- “Some say how she looks and sounds is proof enough.” This is then followed by that athletic young woman, nervously explaining that she did not expect to win the 800 meter race at all. This was not proof enough.

Caster Semenya is awaiting the results of a gender verification test, or maybe its more accurate to say gender verification tests. Not simply a chromosomal test or a brief physical evaluation, she was subjected to a series of invasive tests by a gynecologist, a geneticist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist and an internal medicine physician. These tests were the result of her hard work, suspicion arising from an 8 second faster time. These tests were the result of the ignorance of reality that binary definitions of gender don't work for everyone. These tests are only performed on female athletes.

South Africa, Caster's home, has come out in support of their champion daughter. She was received with celebration and the defense of state officials and the public. After a makeover, She appeared on the cover of South Africa's YOU Magazine, looking very feminine. This is international news as well, ask Diane Kepley.

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), amateur sport's governing body, has said that Caster has committed no crime and is not suspected of cheating in the 800 meter race at the 2009 World Championships in Athletics. She won with the time of 1:55.45. IAAF has said it was “obliged to investigate” her gender based upon this improvement. The Sydney Daily Telegraph has printed claims that Caster is a hermaphrodite. The IAAF is yet to confirm this statement, instead saying that it is premature to say.

Hermaphrodite is an outdated term, intersex is more appropriate. Other athletics have lost their medals because they were found to intersex-- the Indian runner, Santhi Soundarajan, lost the Asia Game's silver metal in 2006 and was diagnosed with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome or AIS, a genetic disorder where an person is born with XY chromosomes but is insensitive to androgens, or male hormones. This causes the body to develop testes internally and for the rest of the body to develop as female. There are over 100 steps in gender development in the fetus and there are possibilities at every step for gender abnormalities or disorders. Between 1 and 2 in 100 babies born have some sort of sexual ambiguity, which means that something like 67,000,000 people in the world are intersex. Some of these people are discovered when they are newborns and then they are subjected to years of painful surgeries, others discover at puberty, some when they try to conceive, some may never know.

An athlete competing in the 1936 Olympics, and finishing fourth in the high jump, was later discovered to be a Jewish man in disguise. This was viewed as an act of self preservation as he was hiding from the Nazis. And there is Spanish hurdler Maria Martinez Patino, who was disqualified from a 1985 competition by genetic tests and striped of her medals, she had passed the tests before. She medals were reinstated after she protested the results. Or there is the story of Stella Walsh, whose gender was only uncovered in an autopsy, 48 years after her world record time in the 100m at the 1932 Olympics.

Female Olympic athletes have been examined since the 1930s and the Olympics started using the more invasive gender verification at the Grenoble Games in 1966. Prior to 1966, the gender examination was an all female nude parade in front of the Olympic committee. The Journal of the American Medical Association states that "gender verification tests are difficult, expensive, and potentially inaccurate. Furthermore, these tests fail to exclude all potential impostors, are discriminatory against women with disorders of sexual development, and may have shattering consequences for athletes who 'fail' a test." Because of questions about the tests accuracy, the International Olympic Committee discontinued the practice in 1999. New Olympic rules allow transsexual athletes that undergo gender reassignment surgery and complete 2 years of hormone treatments to compete under their new gender designation.

Caster's excellence challenges the borders we have placed around race, around gender, around sexuality. What do we suffer then we try to maintain a two-sex system, or keep the races “pure” or teach that sexuality is not a spectrum. Many of us come out from the darkness and hold her name like a banner because we ride the fence or we push the borders.

But Caster ran like the wind, and when she threw her hands in the air and wore that South African flag as a cape, she was a champion. If the IAAF chooses to strip her of that golden medallion, she will still be a champion. Caster Semenya runs for me.

Adams, Cecil. "If a man has a sex change, can he compete in the Olympics as a woman?" The Straight Dope. Web. 08 Oct. 2009.

Caster Runs for Me. Http://casterrunsforme.com/. Web. 20 Sept. 2009.

“Dora Ratjen.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Web. 09 Oct. 2009.

“Gender Verification in Sports.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Web. 09 Oct. 2009.

Kepley, Diane. "She? or He? Is Woman's World Champion." AP Video: Plus. Sept. 2009. She? or He? Is Woman's World Champion. AP Video: Plus, 24 Sept. 2009. Web. .

Peel, Robert. "Maria's Story." Medhelp.org. Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Support Group (AISSG). Web. 08 Oct. 2009.

"Stanislawa Walasiewicz." Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Web. 09 Oct. 2009.

Memo revisited- Sept 20th, 2009

Atop the Cascade Mountains, Lincoln, Oregon was founded as a sawmill settlement in the late 1920's on Highway 66 between Medford and Klamath Falls. The truth is most who have the opportunity to glance upon Lincoln are whizzing by on the "Green Springs Highway" atop huge, swaying logging trucks. If it happens this town catches you between blinks, you could see the remnants of the small sawmill community—a company store, a cookhouse, a bunkhouse, several little cabins and five homes. Now a newer sign reading The Oregon Extension, placed there in 1975, speaks to a different sort of work happening there. (oregonextension.org)

The Bark Burner, a massive structure made of rusted steel looms over the small pond and the meadow alive with horses. A cock calls while keeping watch over a group of chickens on their run. At first glance, it may seem that the pesky duckweed growing on Lincoln's little pond is the most productive thing in this sleepy little village.

Homes occupied by professors are shared with students each fall as re-imagined classrooms. There are no desks or chalk, only students holding cups of tea between two palms, sitting in circles to discuss literature and philosophy, poetry and theology. The company store and cookhouse now serve as library and computer lab, mailroom and chicken coop. The walls in each small cabin are covered with wood paneling or some horrible wallpaper, which serves as a backdrop for community. Here the academic is personal; students have an opportunity to let their personal ideas interact with their person. Students discuss Foucault while cutting wood for their cabin's wood burning stove, William Stringfellow
over dinner, Toni Morrison
while hiking amongst the tall black spine pines. Because community is an assembly of persons, here alchemy creates something much larger than sum of its parts. In the fall, a brown blanket of needles covers the ground. Hundreds of students have lived in the six small cabins and the bunkhouse apartments over the years and there is the buzz of change on the wind.

Julia and Gus are the OE's newest residents. The younger couple lives in one of two bedroom cabins with their dog, Fairny—a black and white ball of energy with tongue. Gus travels down the mountain each day to Pascal Vineyards, where he looks and touches, tastes grapes and taps on the outside of wooden barrels. Julia laughs and cries freely. She is always up for a walk along the wooded path to find the perfect log to sit on to discuss your heart's desire. Julia can keep and tell secrets-- she professes in the gentlest way.

Sam Alvord can seem grumpy. Sam has been at the OE since the start. A retiree, preoccupied and controlling, his days are tinkering with his projects and waxing nostalgic for the way we used to do things. Sam is the sometimes pastor of the tiny Lincoln Christian Church which is home to about 20 regular mountain folks. He has also travelled the country to serve as officiant in numerous OE alumni weddings. In his home each week, Sam hosts a small AA-type support group for former smokers and clandestine smokers-- who sneak off the Barkburner after meetings to stand in the dark in a circle with glowing embers illuminating their conversation. Sam's wife Patsy teaches second grade at the 4-room schoolhouse up Green Springs Highway, talks very little to folks taller than her shoulders. Their house is dark and warm, the light that comes from inside is golden. (Balmer)

A tiny creek trickles between the Alvord's glow and the Frank's house on the hill. Doug Frank is the world's best listener. At times, it occurs to the speaker that you may have spoken one of the world's most profound thoughts in his ear. His legs are crossed; he looks out over his glasses. His living room classroom has a large stone fireplace and large picture windows that look out over the bend in the road.

There, on the bend, is a home under a canopy of pines, which calls like a confessional. Its occupants, The Linton's are an interesting pair. Nancy has long straight black hair and when she sits, she is all limbs contorted. Disheveled, Jon always wears a brown hat and every few minutes he tugs his pants up from the middle belt loop in the back. He is the resident theologian. They are both feminists. The Linton home is open for candle lit communion of dark red wine and heavy nut filled wheat bread.

There is a field of the boring sort behind the Linton's, bordered with a grove of apple trees. The lightest breeze blows there. Cabin 6 has a wraparound porch that looks out onto this field. Its three picnic tables host all manner of things: meals, counseling sessions, poetry readings, guitar concerts.

From Jim's kitchen window, you can hear the sounds of life coming from the cabins. Jim, Lincoln's widower, is the mountains ecologist and he believes God can be found in environmental stewardship. From him, this place provides comfort and daily reminders of his wife. He is dating a woman in town, they swing dance each week. Next to Jim are the Klings. The Klings are the support team. Allison takes care of the paperwork, serving as the campus' registrar. Phil is the maintenance man. Both are tall and skinny, their lanky kids are always jumping on the trampoline or waving sticks around with capes.

The Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail, stretching from Canada to Mexico, crosses just a few miles down the road. For most who visit the Oregon Extension, the only respite from this cloistered place is the weekly journey down the mountain to the town of Ashland. The small OE bus travels the one hour of white-knuckle curves and twists, down and up and down again, past views of endless mountain ranges—to Ashland, Oregon. Ashland is a small college town and provides for all the amenities that come from a congregation of academics- great pubs, and bookstores and a couple organic food co-ops.

Students are eager for the return trip up that winding path to those little cabins on the north side of the highway. Here, each year scholars are made while floating in the pond, the duckweed parting for them. And while staring straight up at the bright full moon framed by the peaks of trees, they allow their life to be their education.

For Ourselves : an interview with Torkwase Dyson

She picked me up a day late, but right on time. Torkwase Dyson looked younger than when we had last seen each other, lighter on her feet. This time she had more of a do for ourselves
attitude. I was prepared to talk with her about an event she is going to be a part of this Saturday – Atlantis- a house dance party with blackness and science fiction as its central theme with Octavia Butler's Wild Seed as inspiration. Her contribution is an underwater video piece of
fish off the coast of Panama, a dark, otherworldly abyssal piece. She was not interested in talking about this at all. She wanted to talk about relationships, women, about my writing, my family, and about sustainability and urban farming. We did spend time talking about her other work and our breakfast turned into a gallery visit, then lunch, and later coffee and much more than I had hoped for.

    Torkwase Dyson and I met at NYU in the
fall of 2004 at the Yari Yari Pamberi, a conference of Black Women Writers Dissenting Globalization. YYP was an amazing assembly of working writers and artists from all over the African Diaspora: Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Sapphire, Alexis DeVeaux, Octavia Butler, Nawal El Sadawai, Edwidge Danticat, Jewell Gomez -- all together with an ease that comes from camaraderie between peers.
It also provided safe space for a community of younger artists and writers to converge.

Torkwase Dyson grew up on Chicago's Southside. She got her MFA from Yale. After many years of traveling and temporary stopovers at academic sites across the country, she seems committed to stay in one spot. This day she was
moving her studio out of her small Prospect Park apartment across town to a small studio in the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn. Her walls had the grey outline of paintings that had long hung there. The last of many moves, this was the move to stay put.

To start, we had smoothies. Torkwase nervously cleaned as she cooked. She refused my offers to help, leaving me to observe her world. Her roommate's dogs were sleepy and fat. The larger one was brown and had a squarely shaved patch on his rear from a recent surgery. Every seven minutes, the quintessential rumble of the train blazed past her window. As she served us grits with eggs, hash browns, and biscuits, she explained that she just started teaching at American University in Washington, D.C. -- commuting there twice a week on the Bolt bus. "After assessing student interest, skills, backgrounds," she said, "I am hoping to create student think tanks and charge them with creating media works together."

We began by talking about the new show she is a part of which is opening in a few days at Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn. The exhibition of seven young black women artists entitled "Fortune Tellers" will feature work she describes as "common objects replaced with uncommon imagery, the transfiguration of the common place." The show's artists work in many different media-- two-dimensional wall pieces, animation, collage, floor pieces, instillation. Torkwase's contribution to this show is from her larger body of work, an exploration of "the hyper urban landscape and its relationship to the natural." She said of her work, "I am looking at the intense imagery of nature on clothes: belt buckles, jeans, so called fancy shirts, sneakers. And using those visual objects- apparel stuff and manipulating it to resemble nature." She described a work entitled "Waiting for the Son to Rise" that features Jesus piece necklaces fashioned with tiny solar panels, a take on fake diamonds, on bling. We looked at her large wall pieces-- works that featured whales and swans and rhinos--
created using earring cards and something called bullet heads as well as large metal necklace charms. These images startle, the texture is reflective and tactile.

"I am concentrating on basic gestures," she tells me, "and on the underbelly of communities on lockdown." There is a real thread of ecology in the body of work as well, when I ask her about this she says, "Yes, yes, with the cyclical threads in fashion, the speed with which subculture is adopting new items of significance, things like earring cards get disregarded. We hear about water bottles, but the greens don't address all the plastic that our merchandise comes attached to." With this work she is "reimagining- reuse."

"The urban environment is in many ways an environment of trash," Torkwase said, "I travel to get these apparel items, I travel to Houston, Memphis, Atlanta, New Orleans and it's a piece of this system of global trade, of Asian wholesalers and African immigrants making a dollar. "

We discussed the future-- the future of the earth, our individual work, the movement, art. She plans to take her work in a new direction. "That's my next project," she said, "I want to follow fabric- apparel production routes: dyes, fabrics, accessories, wholesale. A meditation on access to information, working through the façade of the global cycles of desire, for merchandise produced for black urban poor spaces."

"I am going to create these kiosks, mobile units with solar panels-- enough to create like 60 watts of electricity and bring them up to 125^th street, where there are still guys selling merchandise in an independent way and see how they are received." She finished by saying that in her opinion "the idea of blackness is shifting; the idea of hip hop culture is shifting."

We moved together from her apartment to the Five Myles Gallery where the Fortune Tellers show is to open next week. Our time there was pensive, hands on hips, arms crossed. Passing and pausing. The floor was tacky with new paint.

The gallery visit was an experience in politics. Torkwase was mentoring the show's young curator--
who felt uncomfortable with the title
and liked organizer
better. She studied Kwase to try to read an opinion there in her guarded glances. The owner, an older woman with a thick German accent, looked over the top of her glasses, gestured wildly to get the attention of her construction assistant to request that he move the platform for the projector a few inches to the right. The lighting was harsh and spotlights blazed haphazardly waiting for their position. The walls were that new gallery grey with a touch of ocean or purple. The conflict lie in which wall would best suit Kwase's digital piece and which would suit her larger wall piece in relationship to other works in the show. Slight changes were made and made again.

Kwase was diplomatic, yet later in the car she spoke of the need for Black women run spaces. Spaces where there wouldn't be the hovering, older, how it's done opinion. "Power is in ownership." Later as we drove, she pointed out several vacant buildings suitable to fill this need. "Look, you could have a studio on the first floor."

We ended the interview
at her other home-- a small, black lesbian owned café called Pillow. The space was comfortable and her friends were quick to joke, quick to laugh.
The patio out back was bright with light flickering as the breeze pushed branches and leaves gently. I was grateful to end our time together here, with her family and the inspiration of a community of women creating spaces for themselves.

 

Dyson, Torkwase.  Interview.  Brooklyn, New York.  September 9, 2009.

stand

I grew up at the bottom of a hill, on an oak tree lined street in the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul. We lived in the corner house, the exact place where the median age changed from 80 to young families, from Jewish grandmothers to Catholic schoolgirls with scraped knees and a ring of sticky red juice around their mouths. Our family was different. I was a little black/white girl, too chubby and too tall.

Mom helped me drag the coffee table down to the end of the driveway next to the full lilac bush. I spent an hour carefully bubbling letters onto the page with bold colored Crayola markers: "Koolaid, 15 cents a glass." I waited patiently. The iced melted. Josh, from across the street, passed on his skateboard. My stepdad watched this agony for an hour, then placed two coins in my 3 year old brother's hand.