On Feeling Far Away
There are times when I remember I’m living on the edge of the country. There are times when San Francisco feels far away. We are the furthest west you can go before plunging into the Pacific Ocean. We are far from Ferguson, burning through the night. Far away from Cleveland, where twelve-year-old Tamir E. Rice was shot by a police officer on Saturday and passed away on Sunday.
The distance is stretched further by differences in climate and time zone. The light here is always like a painting, and in the Mission, it’s almost always sunny. When the riots broke out in Ferguson on Monday night, I was sitting on our back porch, watching the humming birds visit a neighbor’s lemon tree.
James Baldwin observed these things about San Francisco when he was here decades ago. In a 1964 documentary about the city, Take This Hammer, he said it would be easy to walk through San Francisco and “imagine that everything was at peace. It certainly looks that way on the surface.” It’s easier to hide here, he says, “because you have the view, you have the hills.” But then he pauses, looking out the window of the moving car, and says, “But it’s just another American city. And if you’re a black man, that means…” and his voice trails off. Another pause. “The children dying here are dying in New York for the very same reason…This is just a better place to lie about it.”
In addition to feeling far away, I have also felt hopeless, flattened out, about what feels like the inexorable repetition of history, over and over again. So much of what Baldwin writes to his nephew in The Fire Next Time pertains here, now. To Michael Brown, Baldwin might have written these exact words: “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.” And once again, we have earned Baldwin’s indictment of white America: that we are still “trapped in a history which [we] do not understand and until [we] understand it, [we] cannot be released from it.” Though there will be no formal trial for Darren Wilson, white America has once again testified to its “inhumanity and fear.”
So when I say that I feel far away, it’s more than just my westward-flung position, more than mere geography and differences in light. It’s the disassociation that occurs between the self I claim, and the self that claims a membership in whiteness, the inheritance of privilege and shame. But the sense of disassociation is contrived and convenient. Because as Baldwin said on camera in this city in 1964, “There is no moral distance — which is to say, no distance — between the facts of life in San Francisco, and the facts of life in Birmingham.” No moral distance. No distance between the selves, no distance between the states.
And for all the similarities between 1964 and 2014, I find myself desperately looking for the differences. Does progress take shape in the solidarity of riots throughout various American cities—East, West, and South—and the ubiquitous news coverage across all channels? The fight in the sixties was for the dispensing of legal rights. Today, it’s about the failure of those rights and laws in practice—the farce of legal protection, as embodied by law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
Though it may be too soon to say — and though it offers little comfort to mothers who fear letting their black sons walk to school today — I wonder if this is what progress looks and feels like. This rage, this violence, this burning through the night; the forced acknowledgment of visceral disassociation and far-flung distance between who we are and who we want to be, between rights on paper and rights in practice.
I keep thinking of a scene in Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration, set on the battlegrounds of World War I, where a doctor named Rivers notes small improvements in one of his patients, a soldier suffering from PTSD, obsessed with the image of a rotting corpse. Barker writes:
Rivers knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.
If it feels like it’s all falling apart, maybe that’s because it has to. Maybe decay is our era’s truest emblem.
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