So it's really good to be with you.
In 2015, in the fall of 2015, I left my job
and my apartment in New York for what I thought
would be a year in Morocco on a Fulbright.
I had proposed a project to research representations
of Blackness in the Maghreb, in that part of North Africa
and Northwest Africa, both literary and visual depictions
of Blackness.
And I went and I thought I would be there for a year.
And two months into my time there,
I was on an overnight bus that crashed.
And I was badly hurt and it took a minute for the doctors
to figure out how badly hurt I was.
And I ended up in Zurich, Switzerland, where
I had lived with an ex-partner who's Swiss,
and was in the hospital for about two months,
had a number of surgeries, and ended up back
in my childhood bedroom in the Bronx.
You know?
And so to think that you're about to spend
a year in your ancestral homeland
and then to end up home quite differently
was, of course, a surreal experience for me
and rife with spiritual questions
that I filled notebooks with, and eventually made this poem
out of.
So I think I will read the poem nearly in its entirety, which
takes me about 10 minutes just so you can feel prepared.
You know what you're getting yourself into.
We're about to go on a journey to Morocco.
Lots of things happen, many of them challenging.
So I think it's important to let you know where you're going.
It's called "On the Overnight from Agadir."
And there is an epigraph from Darwish.
"Your cause and your life are one."
"Don't go to discover your roots, ladybug says.
If you want to look for roots go and look at a tree.
Another day at a cafe, avoiding, pretending.
Why did you come here?
Tell me why.
If you want to die, go ahead and die.
Do it quickly.
If you want to be dead, you can be dead.
But the days are long and always the same.
But the nights are long and always the same.
I feel that time has me in a way, do you know?
A tree.
But do you see its roots when you look at a tree?
The syringa from the cover of that playbill in high school
haunted me for weeks.
Its net of empty branches.
See, that's the problem, that right there,
how the mind moves from the one thing that's here
and suddenly I am 55 though it's still 2 o'clock on Tuesday.
2 o'clock on Tuesday happens in Morocco too.
My mother says we are European, and I shake my head
at her desperate face.
My mother says we speak French in Morocco.
And I shake my head.
Morgan says maybe it could be good
for you to travel to the motherland.
It's necessary trauma for each of us.
I call my partner, my ex-partner in Brussels
with whom I lived in seven cities on three continents,
and say Habibi, I think I just want
my own apartment and a dog and to stop working like a mule.
And we laugh.
Morgan says you have to go.
Why do I sense that I cannot trust what I feel in my chest?
Are there even trees in North Africa?
If you don't want to live, you don't want to live anywhere.
Avoiding what?
The-- I'm sorry but there's no other way
to say it-- meaninglessness.
So that is why you get on a plane
and go to the third world for a year?
I don't know.
Clearly, I don't know.
When the third world as a phrase is so--
did the colonizer kill or make thrive?
Did the colonizer kill or make thrive?
Honestly, who cares?
I don't need history to justify me.
I just want a dog.
I wouldn't mind having a Moroccan lover,
I tell my shrink, out of things to say.
Perhaps taking a Moroccan lover, ideally a Black one,
will help you feel connected to yourself in a new way,
rejuvenate your enthusiasm for living, your sense of purpose.
I fire my shrink on the spot.
Call the second one as I'm leaving the office,
and fire her, too.
On the street a Frenchie shits on the curb,
her owner on his phone, looking the other way.
I know exactly who I am.
It's that there is no point.
And then I'm telling you, just go, and look at a tree.
Then in the early morning hours on a bus almost returned
to Rabat, a razor of light slits my eye down the center.
Suddenly, the bus on its side, dirt in the air,
stars in the dirt.
In one skull, an eye looks west, another east.
Into a net of glass a girl's face is pressed.
A hand cuts the smoke inside the bus.
He stepped over a woman his Omi's age, hijab beside her,
blonde hair exposed, her arms and legs
splayed into a geometric shape.
He threw himself from the bus's side, a tingling
from his shoulder to his thumb.
A green eye, a brown eye in the same skull.
A woman inside a bush, a child and man
merged at the waist, two heads, two torsos, no feet.
On the side of the road, weeds, a cough, another, no horns,
a light, some trees.
Inside the darkness my eyes make a dark, all outline.
It hangs heavy over me, its empty face locked
on my emptied face, holding us there in mutual study.
Then a slow lifting, and I breathe awake.
Awake in the hospital bed, my phone rings.
Ladybug, you thought you were going to Morocco,
she says, laughing.
You were going to the body.
I know the doctor says he's fine.
But he cannot feel his hand.
I know.
But the doctor says he's fine.
The doctor says he'll be back to his old self in no time.
What language were you speaking?
Did you reach his parents?
Yes.
He doesn't want them to come.
Has the mother been informed?
Of her Blackness or that of her children?
Stop.
The boy's neck, has the mother been informed of the neck?
Dear one, I was trying to enter my own life.
I felt outside my own life.
I was looking, trying to find a door to quiet
the mind I knew I was more than.
I wanted to control only what I could control.
I wanted nothing grand, epiphanic, oracular.
On the contrary, I wanted to be small,
to disturb and be disturbed the absolute least.
Silly?
Naive?
The clock kept telling me my birthday 12:27.
Every day for a year I saw it twice.
You were waiting to live.
It happens to the best of us.
The withing is within wherever you take it.
When did you break your neck?
Three years ago now?
What stillness did you seek?
Whatever you're looking for is not here.
What does he look for?
Who does he look to be?
If he wants to be dead, he can be dead.
Dear one, I thought the clock was
telling me to start over that I could start over any time.
I mean two births a day!
As the bus tilted onto its side and crashed,
I saw all I would not become, a thin book turned into a face,
the face turned into for my work, I exclaimed inwardly,
to no one in particular as we hit the gravel.
I have not done my work.
Mo brings me coffee in the snow to the Upper West Side
all the way from Brooklyn and says,
baby, you weren't supposed to be there.
You weren't supposed to be there and the ancestors saved you.
A wooden bowl of unripe persimmons
on my friend's coffee table, a ceramic bowl of yogurt
with raw honey.
V says see, if that accident had happened to me
my mother would have been on the first plane out of Vancouver
to be by my side.
Morgan meets me for brunch so I can start getting
back out into the world.
Still in a neck brace, I look into her compassion.
We both struggle.
I found my old shrink from college and say,
can you believe this shit?
I almost can't.
And we laugh.
Mo says, you weren't supposed to be there, baby.
And we post pics on Facebook to make our friends smile.
Look, you did not listen to yourself.
You did not want to go by which I mean the child inside you
and I don't care how that sounds.
I hit Reply to the email then X out of the draft.
I hit Reply again, then go down the hall for tea.
I mean the injury took you back to Zurich where
you had tried to love a man into being your father,
then to your childhood bedroom in the Bronx.
You can't make that shit up.
I carry my tea back to the desk.
It goes cold before I take a sip.
Dear one, another bed, flat on my back again,
returned to the waiting.
I am waiting for the neck to heal, to live.
What generates this sensation that life is elsewhere
or happening in the future?
That it will begin once the neck has healed
and I arrive in California, where
it will begin once I am worthy of living,
or once I feel comfortable more often than I do not,
or once I can provide for myself in a two-bedroom apartment
where it will begin once I no longer look
outside myself for an answer, or once I no longer feel
drawn to Morocco to our pain, or once
where does the self hide when it hides?
Where was I, if I didn't know why I was there?
Where does the inquiry begin?
Does it begin in my particular body and my particular mind?
Does it begin centuries before me?
Does it begin in my mother?
Does it begin in all these places at once,
once the market tries to close?
Once the mother gives her son a face he can use?
It's not the skin so much as it is
the shape of the bones beneath it,
the way they form a gestalt. Once the father says,
come back, my boy, I see you?
I want you to know that I see you.
Listen, I have mulled this over ad nauseam,
all obvious interpretations are trite, lacking, completely
uncompelling.
That my home is not there, that I
needed to leave, that I had to care better for my body,
that my body did not belong to me.
Nothing is ordered.
Everything is random.
Nothing is ordered.
If you will not use your voice to speak,
your voice will be taken.
It's not your work, silly boy.
If you will not do it, your gifts
will be passed to another.
Thank you for driving slowly I say from the back seat.
When I was last here three years ago now I was badly hurt.
The road lines vacant, lots of dust,
hot air cycling through the open windows.
Yes, they told me at the riad he says, I'd like to show you
something.
He pulls down the neck of his t-shirt,
a scar from his hairline down his spine.
I exit my body then return so forcefully I shift in my seat.
18 years prior two thieves in his taxi,
he explains, a struggle.
The car splayed by a tree, a broken neck,
two months in hospital, the scar.
And so I think Allah sent me to you.
What road is this, I ask?
He turns, hands steady on the wheel.
The A3, it runs North to South, from Casa to Agadir."
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks y'all.