So like many of us, we experienced the pandemic
alone and together to some degree.
And after the pandemic and particularly during the pandemic
when there were the protests of Ahmaud Arbery's death and George
Floyd, it brought back--
sometimes you forget very traumatic-- rightfully
so you should forget very traumatic moments.
You can't live with them.
And I started remembering moments of run-ins
that I've had with the police.
And sometimes I would get--
I would call it like a sitting sickness where I couldn't move.
I would be somewhere and I would--
I just couldn't move.
I would finish a run or finish riding out on a trail somewhere
and I just-- would sit in my car because I couldn't move.
And so I started thinking about and writing letters
to Michael Brown in 2014, 2015 and here's a letter.
It's from my book of essays called Dark Days.
July 22, 2022.
Dear Michael, I'm in a parking lot and cannot convince myself
to start my truck and drive home.
The fear of dying, being killed by a police officer
overwhelms me.
I lean on my one leg hanging out of the truck,
my foot stuck against the pavement.
The pavement glitters as if someone--
if-- excuse me.
The pavement glitters as if some intergalactic glass or star
exploded and emptied its corpse all over the asphalt.
When I'm done tracing the slivers of glass
with my eyes I look up, the evening sky
cast off its intense blue of the day
for softer pinks and oranges.
And there I am below it despite distracting myself
with the grace of shapes and colors
thinking of you, Philando Castile, George
Floyd, and Sandra Bland.
Black men and women whose death waited for them,
found them on the road, their assassins
taking the shape of the police.
Dusk dips its head and yields the night
and I am still here remembering your deaths,
not wanting to leave because at least here I am alive
and the police nowhere near the warm aroma of cedar and chlorine
burnishing the evening.
Sometimes I lift my head and try to drag the smell of cedar
into me, but the fumes of the chlorine which
is used to sanitize the water, jumping out
of spray nozzles in the ground, water pouring down
from pink and yellow umbrellas and mushrooms
at the little water park across from the parking lot
we call a splash pad here in Texas, it's too strong.
So tonight being alive but being paralyzed in this living
smells like chlorine with a faint hint of cedar beneath it.
And beneath the canopy of the late summer
heat, a shirtless man sitting at a green picnic table.
His black-- his back to the splash pad, a cigarette in one
hand, his small dog at his feet pulling
at the leash tethered to the metal legs of the table.
This will be living in service distraction from dying.
The man's finger whisks along the screen of the phone
and for a moment, I forget about dying, meeting my death out
on the road and become absorbed and watching the man
scroll through whatever causes the 5 o'clock
shadow around his mouth to lift into a smile.
What does he love?
What makes him smile?
So clearly, he loves the dog at his bare feet
that he shushes after it yips and yips
at the children who chase each other beneath the umbrellas
of water, leaping through the water, shooting from the ground.
And obviously the man loves an evening cigarette
in the middle of a drought.
The smoke lifting up from his face curling and disappearing.
For a moment, I want to feel the relief that an evening
cigarette brings.
Instead, the white cigarette in his hand
throws me down in memory into thinking
about the black and white television
footage of Palestinian novelist, playwright, journalist
and political leader Ghassan Kanafani discussing his people,
Palestinians defending themselves
from a fascist government and Zionist terror.
I don't quite know why the cigarette reminds me
of Kanafani; in none of the television footage
is he smoking, though someone next to him at a news conference
appears to be holding something like a cigarette,
though there is no invisible-- no visible smoke
wafting from it.
Maybe it's the barefoot man's face, the tilt of his head,
the bushiness of his mustache, the way
he balances the cigarette between his fingers,
the tenderness of it, that reminds me of Kanafani.
If you listen to Kanafani's interviews, to his firmness,
you might question and reject my assertion of tenderness.
But even his unyielding persistence
in the dipping of his head toward the reporters who
interview him as if he might suddenly lock shoulders
with them and wrestle them to the floor
there in that motion, in that wrestling
lives, gentleness, a love, something I
might call soft and pliant, something like the way smoke
wreaths and bends itself around any hard thing it encounters.
Maybe it's the whiteness of the barefoot man's cigarette
that reminds me of Kanafani.
The whiteness of the cigarette, very much
like the whiteness of Kanafani's shirt in an interview
with Richard Carleton, an Australian journalist
who dismissed the Palestinian struggle for self-determination
as a conflict, as a civil war in 1970
rather than as what it was, and is,
a liberation movement fighting for justice.
It is in that interview where Kanafani declares
that talks or discussions of peace
between Palestinian peoples and the Israeli state
is a conversation between the sword and the neck.
A conversation that ends in liberation or death.
The sword and the neck.
This the conversation between Black people in America.
A conversation had and a conversation to be had.
However, while sitting in this parking lot watching
the first daubs of night smear across the bottom of the sky
and unfold a barefoot man smoking
a cigarette in its cloak, it is Kanafani's strange feeling
that he wrote about in a letter to a friend that has sent me
thinking of you, writing to you, Michael, after all these years.
My feelings are very strange, writes Kanafani.
They are the feelings of a man who is on his way
somewhere in search of suitable work
when he died suddenly on the road.
When I read this quote, I thought
of you and George Floyd, who had died on the road.
And then I thought of Sandra Bland, who was on her way
somewhere and died on the road.
Did you two have a strange feeling?
Kanafani's uneasy feeling anticipated his death
13 years later.
Mossad, the Israeli National Intelligence Agency,
planted a bomb beneath his car that
detonated, assassinating him and killing his beloved young niece.
Like you, he was a man on the way towards something
and suddenly found his death on the road.
Neither of you had the privilege of a calm death,
but rather the death of the sword in the neck.
A death that comes about because you live in a time of hostility.
In war, Kanafani writes, the winds of peace
gather the combatants to repose truce, tranquility,
the holiday of retreat.
But this is not so with hostilities, which are never
more than a gun shot away, where you are always walking
miraculously between the shots.
This without the hint of peace, this lack of repose
is where I find myself.
Miraculously somewhere between the bullets and the winds
of peace, fettered and jailed somewhere else
is what keeps me staring out into the dark shapes,
turning in the night, watching a man smoke
a cigarette in the dark.
Where am I between the bullets?
Where are the bullets and do any of them
know my name as they knew yours?
While the nation might pretend to know our names calling
US urban youth or super predator,
the bullets of the nation do know
that they rush to tear our lives from our flesh,
leave us as the refuse of safety of progress.
The bullets plowing the fertile landscapes
of our bodies, our deaths, the blood that causes the corn
and wheat to rise.
I hope none of the bullets are calling out to me.
Sometime I'm dizzy and overwhelmed by the echo
of deaths like yours.
Deaths that come by the assassin in his blue uniform and contempt
for our lives.
Your death, the memory of it comes upon me
with the rush of a slamming car door.
While driving home one morning after a run along the Colorado
River last summer, the summer after George Floyd's murder,
the sky's new blue sprawled out and wet before me,
the last words of George Floyd flooded me.
Floyd, a man choked to death by Minneapolis police officer Derek
Chauvin.
His assassin knelt upon his pleading, Mama, I can't breathe.
Floyd's mother, no longer alive, but the only solace
he could request or reach for as his life
was being throttled from him.
Sitting in the cage of the car, the car whisking over
the newly laid asphalt on a highway
who could not turn from the phrase his voice, Mama,
I can't breathe.
I drove down the highway with a thunder and gray of that
sadness moving inside me.
The irony of such a blue sky in front of me
and could do nothing but cry and drive.
Today, the sadness over the seeming disposability
of our lives will not let me up, will not
let me out of this parking lot.
I don't allow myself to cry because if I do,
I might not be able to get up from beneath that darkness
and go home.
Once I let myself fall beneath such a sadness,
a deep down sadness that kept me latched to a friend's bedroom
floor, crying for a whole day.
A sharp pain that from my ear down into my neck
wouldn't let me rest, kept me up at night, clutching my head,
unable to control or bring down any semblance of peace
or relief.
It was the first time that I had felt an ailment, a suffering
that seemed to have no end.
I started to cry because of the pain.
Going to jump down.
I call my partner.
Normally, I sit wherever I find myself
with these memories and disturbing thoughts
until they dull or I become distracted
or can force myself to jab the key into the ignition
and allow my feet and hands to guide me home.
My brain turned off, languishing in the malaise
of weathering this visitation of those spirits.
But today I couldn't get the pass--
couldn't get past the memory of the dead and my potential dying.
You think these thoughts because you're alone, my partner said.
Alone as in you're not with your people.
Community keeps the graveyard and the potential bullets
that seek to push you beneath its lawn at bay.
Muzzles and measures grief allows
us to touch lives we've been denied like Baby Suggs and Toni
Morrison's Beloved.
In the novel, Suggs takes everyone
in the community, a community of runaways and survivors
of slavery, out to a grove in the woods near their homes
to cry and laugh so they can get closer to themselves.
Closer to what has denied them and what they denied themselves
during slavery, their lives and love unfettered, messy.
We share our sadnesses, our griefs, our hurts, our lives,
our love with our community, so in order
to reckon with them, which is to say, feel them,
we have to do it with others.
We have to laugh a hysterical laugh while crying hysterically
in the next moment.
And we must do it together in a grove sometimes
and in the streets, in boulevards of America,
at other times, in a sort of study group.
In the parking lot, I am by myself without directive,
without a grove of my people.
So my grief is just running wild all through me without anyone
to adjust or help me understand its darkness.
I am neither sitting on a porch nor in the bottom
of a church with an elder who has been down to the river
and down at the cross to return what was left after America
was through with it--
through with them.
Which makes me think of James Baldwin and the stories
you hear of him sitting in dorm rooms with college students
after giving a lecture or reading
all of them grappling with the consternation, difficulty
and grief of trying to live, love, and thrive
in a country that seems to want its opposite.
I can see it.
James Baldwin sitting on a couch in some dormitory apartment
building in Washington DC or Atlanta,
his legs crossed, a burning down cigarette
in one hand, the smoke wafting above his head,
forming a large, lazy halo.
A gaggle of students leaning toward him,
peppering with questions.
One student asks, why must Black people die in order
for the nation to live?
I imagine Baldwin leaning toward them saying,
because that baby is what it means to be a nation.
And he'd take a drag of his cigarette,
blow it across the living room and the students
and let the words and smoke settle over their shoulders
and eyes before continuing.
And America, while it's sure it wants to be a nation,
Baldwin continues, deludes itself
daily about the cost of that ambition.
The cost being you and me and itself.
America will kill itself in order to become itself.
But what will it have?
What will it have?
Is this the work that you, we have
found on the road, the cost, the price of the nation?
Must our lives always be remanded to symbol,
to spectacle, to commodity, to exchange,
to historical marker or announcement
for some cultural, political shift needed?
When can we find ourselves on the road
without the strange feeling of our deaths
at the back of our necks?
Come home, says my partner.
[APPLAUSE]