G and I went for pho then walked through Judkins Park, the post-war craftsman neighborhood facing Mount Rainier that’s now Seattle’s Vietnamese and Ethiopian heart– travel agents, realtors; smell of yeast, roasting beef, pastries in the oven before the shops open; flowering dogwood; ropes of red firecrackers squashed into the pavement the morning after Lunar New Year.
The sun set– so much day done by sunset in April! I’ll never get used to it– while G and I sat on two stumps in the park’s community garden, between a bed of tulips (sign in Amharic) and of kale (sign in Vietnamese).
We took each others’ pictures, since the light was good. Then I had a series of imaginative spasms: Our now-neighbors’ burned coffee plantation or dam-flooded village back home, war with Eritrea or us, family tyrannies, drought, year in burlap tent or shanty before asylum; then all of asylum’s paperwork mazes, perverse demands; incomprehensible street signs, home’s terrible remoteness. Then them here now.
Then a second spasm, the experience of my privilege. Privilege of imagination (I can say flooded village or three generations under plywood and contain some version of these things in my head a whole second) and of my own safety, I who’ve never sought asylum, have been taught I have the freedom to change.
Then a sense of the unthinkable mustard-seed smallness of a single life. The number of lives, 1,000 years ago, across the street, in Addis Ababa this week, spent without having once the chance to express a full humanity through action on their world: to live cheated of labor or voice, like one’s grandparents’ grandparents. The minuteness of any single person’s effort (last week I spent my first evening in jail, training to teach there in the summer) to fight injustice. Dam flooding as a figure for history itself.
Then the way the lyric imagination can contain more life than the reader will ever live (Kenneth Koch: “Russia is on my lap”) or more injustice, skewedness, and misery than a Western reader like me hopes ever to experience (Carolyn Forch??: “the dahlias tossed / on his grave and bells / waiting with their tongues cut out / for this particular silence”; Linh Dinh: “We stroll past cage after cage with nothing in it but a damp, earthy smell. Gone in body but held in smell. How can a foul smell linger for so long without a fleshy agent?” ).
So my mind leaps; I’ll work then I’ll die. Give it fifty or so (but who knows? “Your fathers did eat manna, and are dead“) more Aprils.
Last: Is this the appeal of sharing a value system bigger than a single life? The hope that something else as huge as lyric imagination might act upon the world? Is resisting oppression easier when you feel connected– by ritual or values– to to “the unborn and dead“? To be, in our reflection and action, braided into something stretched behind and ahead?
And this week I learned dogwood petals are actually leaves! My old state tree had slyly fooled me. Almost no four-petaled flowers in nature.