Lenses and Chasms

It’s taken me forever to finish this post started a week ago. Anxiety over events in New Orleans took my focus AGAIN. I am bored with myself. That sometimes I let the fallout from Hurricane Katrina consume me, for much shorter periods now, but still far longer than my two-hour rule. Two hours was the max I allowed myself to worry about something gone wrong before the storm.

I’m restless. I haven’t been back to the States in a year—first time since I came, almost four years ago, that I’ve spent a full year just in Mexico. Until a few weeks ago I was comfortable with this—being in San Miguel with short excursions to other Mexican cities. But lately I’ve been having fish outta water experiences, something I haven’t felt for a long time here. I’ve wanted to go home, not to a specific location but home to my creative, thinking, colored-American community, not strictly African-American but non-white.

It started with Michael’s death—mourning his passing, celebrating his life in a community that thought child molester when they heard his name. It’s interesting where people choose to be reflective. My friends here question much that is disseminated through the media but accepted unproven allocations about Michael without giving them much thought. They view him through a different lens. He wasn’t their hero, one of their ambassadors, like Aretha and Stevie, showing American, and the world, what it meant to be young, gifted and Black.

Our book club’s discussion of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel, Sally Hemings, was another isolating event. I couldn’t believe that these intelligent, educated women were romanticizing slavery, accepting the author’s interpretation, that Sally’s love for Jefferson supercede all the sorrow surrounding their union—his not returning to Paris, as promised, where she would have been free; losing her children; having three siblings sold at auction following Jefferson’s death. And one of the romanticizers was Black. But raised in an environment different from any I've known; by a mother who thought Black salvation lay in marrying white. In essence, over time, eradicating the brown. When discussing this with an old friend, who, like me, is living far outside her comfort zone, Teia pointed out that, fucked up as this was, it demonstrated progress. In the space of 30 years, reaction to this book had moved from outrage and denial to rose-tinted glasses. Progress doesn’t always match our fantasy of change.

Discussions on the ignorant comments in the States regarding Malia Obama (wearing shorts in Italy with Puffy), and Professor Gates' arrest made me aware that empathy and shared experiences are not the same, it’s the difference between head space and heart space.

We humans may be more alike than different but the lens through which we’ve experienced life creates chasms. One of the reasons I’ve stayed in San Miguel is that living here broadens my life lens—not just through my interaction with Mexicans and their culture but also through my communication with Canadians and white Americans. But I don’t always feel like being a student. Right now, I’m wanting to be among people who have experienced life through my lens.