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We Have to Write When the World is On Fire
Our art will get us through this…I hope.
Most days, I feel as if I’m watching fires. Bodies piled on a pyre, the sky awash in ash, embers hot on the skin while millions mill about. They clap their hands. They shake their fists. Bombastic in their ignorance. Proud. And they’re shouting one sentence in pantomime: we voted for it all to burn. And by all I mean human decency and basic intelligence.
Although I was born in America, I’ve never called myself an American. After nearly thirty countries traveled, when people ask where I’m from, I say New York. Sometimes I say I’m a New Yorker who happens to live in California. Because saying the words I’m an American always felt like an ill-fitted suit. The kind where the wool nicks at your skin, the kind where you’re forever taking off your jacket because it’s too hot but then you’re too cold and the temperature never feels quite right. And so you oscillate between momentary comfort and longer stretches of discomfort — desperate for a new suit. A different suit.
I wake and I’m ashamed. I’m embarrassed. The memes and skits and commentaries are right — we are a disgrace. We are a racist country clawing their way back to a time when white men wore hats and white women fanned themselves with their silk gloves. A time when women didn’t speak much so they…
