Letter From Minnesota: This Occupation is Strange But Familiar

My youngest child has a habit of reordering time when she speaks with me, the past, present and future shuttering in her sentences. At bedtime she’ll ask me, “baba, what will we do yesterday?” In the morning, “where were we tomorrow?” I pause, with no response, I do not correct her, and think of this verbal reordering often, the freedom with which she moves in and out of sequence, in two directions simultaneously. This morning my partner and I wake up early to the sound of whistles, we try to determine where they are coming from, we make a plan, today I stay with the kids, she walks down the block where an ICE patrol is watching, whistling, witnessing as a group of masked agents are waiting in an unmarked vehicle outside an apartment complex adjacent to our daughter’s school. No one is taken. It does not feel like winning. I teach at a local university, one of my courses is on the poetics of failure. Today we are discussing the limitations of language, how we may desire it to approximate thought, but even at its sharpest there is not a mirror reflection between thought and language, between the world and how we would attempt to make it sayable. I do not know how to say what I mean here. How before I walk into class, two black women activists were arrested by federal agents for protesting a church where one of the pastors is the director of an ICE field office. I do not know how to say among the statutes considered by the Department of Justice to charge these black women activists is the Ku Klux Klan Act. In class we discuss what it means to fail, what it means to succeed, the ideas we are unwittingly invested in entangled in that binary. We discuss failing at something, play telephone, watch as the husks of words peel and transform between our ears, coming back to us again as something unlike where they began. Did we fail in the game? Nothing today felt like play, yesterday my phone will be buzzing with messages, a child was used as bait, ICE is sending out flyers offering food support to families, don’t take the bait. I think about how long the future feels, how short yesterday is becoming in the imperial story, one that no longer whispers its mythological origins. I am talking with my mentor about our shared distrust in charisma, about how I am careful of belief, even as I want to believe. Tonight I am wanting, and I am writing, and failing at writing, I take a pause, and shuttering through it is tomorrow’s execution, yesterday’s abduction set to the acoustics of sirens and helicopters and too much terror that is sonically misrecognized, and I am told that we are occupied, but they keep getting the dates wrong, something always slips in the murderous settler-colonial present with a too short yesterday. Yes, today is something strange in Minneapolis, but not because it is unfamiliar, we are so successful at the taking in this country, so successful at stockpiling the violence, and the memory of the violence and the forgetting of it too. I am forgetting to say something, maybe it is about how I do not want to cast this nation’s shadow, about how I cast this nation’s shadow. I want to fail here also, at being governed, at casting the shadow of that governance, I want to fail in the way my students and I are discussing poetics, about what is exhausted by our moan, and hum and wail. And what might be the interval between the cacophonous sound we make and an elsewhere? We are unsure but we bend our words, and talk about John Coltrane, how he said I begin in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once. And if this were the middle of the sentence, I can see my daughter lying down on one side of it, helping me build the muscle memory of a grammar I had forgotten, she is asking me what we will do yesterday and where we were tomorrow and I still do not know how to answer her, but I am walking backwards into the sentence now, and forwards too. I cup some water in my hands wash her face and mine like the only prayer I know how to say and sprint into a yesterday where we learn to remember tomorrow.