Writing as Citizenship
Prior to starting the New American Diaspora, I had struggled with how to write about the homeless issue. I had written pieces here and there but they felt scattered and lacking purpose. This frustrated me. I was hoping a voice would emerge because my interactions with the homeless seemed to be ratcheting up and I didn't want the writing to be aimless.
I felt an urgency to define this voice.
Then...
I was sitting on the couch waiting for a friend to finish her remote work. As soon as she finished, we were going to walk in rain during and get a meal from a food cart. We would pass homeless people on our walk, a sight on almost every walk in Portland, and thus the homeless would be part of our experience.
I asked if she had some reading material around and then remembered the book about William Faulkner's views on the Civil War and segregation that I had given her for Christmas. Critics had lauded the book for its unique investigation into Faulkner's racial ideas as expressed through his novels and private and public statements. Many of these ideas were outright bigotry and disgusting, and he basically approved of segregation, but it wasn't as simple as that in his life and books. For whatever his faults, Faulkner knew that slavery and the legacy of slavery were the great evil in American society and that it was never going to become merely history. And clearly he was right on that point if you consider what goes on in the states of the former Confederacy, particularly with regard to voter suppression efforts.
My friend retrieved the book for me and I started reading the preface. In it, the author, an academic, described his writing about this subject as an “act of citizenship.” He made that claim because he felt a duty to try and make sense of Faulkner and his writing because of their relevance to racial matters today and why real progress seems so slow and so many Americans, including politicians and law enforcement officials, are so obviously racist.
As I read the preface, I asked my friend for some paper and a pen to take notes. A light bulb had come on. No, it was a ballroom chandelier that lit up.
I finally had figured out how I wanted to approach the writing about the homeless: make it an act of citizenship.
What is citizenship? It is fulfilling basic duties that keep a republic working. One of those duties is noticing and caring for those who can't or won't care for themselves. Caring makes the body republic stronger and binds up its wounds. If we don't care, a republic collapses into gated communities of body and mind and there is no common ground to share. There is only division, otherness, and eventual disintegration.
Most American can't even define basic citizenship. Flying an American flag is not citizenship. Sharing a link is not citizenship. Breaking a window of a donut shop is not citizenship. Neither is walking out of a legislative session when you aren't in the majority and losing every vote.
Think about this: virtually every homeless person I encounter is an American citizen yet they now no longer belong to the citizenry. Where did the disenfranchisement begin? Can an act of writing as citizenship help in some way help re-enroll citizens? This of course, assumes these people want to be re-enrolled in the America the Beautiful.
To care as a citizen is to act in some way. Yes, voting to approve an expensive bond measure to fund increased services and housing for the homeless in a municipality is performing an act of citizenship. Voting no is doing nothing and a supreme act of selfish indifference. If you are consumed with selfish indifference toward the common good, you are not a citizen and you need to be called out by real citizens, some of whom might not even be official citizens of America. Who gives a shit about that phony designation? Are you working, caring, contributing or not? Or are you checked into a luxury hotel of your own thoughts and comfort and checked out of giving a damn about your fellow human beings?
I made the decision on the couch reading the preface that I would now consider my writing about the homeless as an act of citizenship, and more than just journalism or anthropology or novelization. Does that seem pretentious of far fetched? I don't know and I don't care. I now had a frame of reference and nostalgia will have nothing to do with it.
My goal with this newsletter is to engage with the issue of homelessness where it is, not in the abstract, and to assay it (and perhaps act on what I learn). I will engage without any methodology or schedule or genre or format except for this simple platform. I might make a few bucks from paid subscribers but that's hardly the point. There is no book deal. There is no research for a film. I won't go live with them for a year, then leave and write a memoir. I won't begin interviewing them with a stock set of questions for some academic study. I'm not going to write a grant to fund this or that initiative.
It's all pretty much random in this approach and I will engage in a different way with each encounter because that's how its fallen out so far. The bottom line, however, is that I want to care in some way, and writing is the beginning of that. Then I hope to do more.
You can't write about something coherently that way, can you? Well, that's what I'm doing. This non-model model could change as my interactions mount.
Will my caring be genuine? Only I can determine that. I am always trying to determine this.
My moments with the homeless are either fleeting or seem to last forever. Some moments feel almost poetic, like a blooming daffodil in a flower pot surrounded by human filth; others feel totally pathetic, like an addled human being surrounded by human filth guarded by a dog who exhibits more dignity than the human being.
The juxtaposition of daffodil blooming in a flower pot in the middle of an encampment that looks like it was under fire from a mortar barrage is something I can't work out in my mind. Who cultivates a daffodil while under a mortar barrage? Someone does. They also care for their dogs. They sometimes play foosball in their encampments. They hang art on their rigs.
Onward. Writing as an act of citizenship also requires something else. Movement. You have to get off your ass and off the internet. You must observe and listen. Then you take it from there.