Letter From Minnesota: Vigil in a Besieged City

The closest analogy I can make to how it feels to be living in Minneapolis, a city besieged by ICE agents, is how I felt a political prisoner in 1970 for resisting the war in Vietnam. I was alternately bored, terrified, and amazed at the community that existed inside the prison. The feeling now, as it was then, is that we are always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Nobody can predict what will happen next. There are too many unknown and unknowable factors. It is hard to explain, but that is why we have poets and writers: to help us see what is otherwise impossible to fathom.

The day Renee Good was murdered my wife and I decided to go to the site where it had happened. JoAnn gathered a few things—a whistle, a candle, a cellphone charger, masks—and we made the ten-minute drive to Park and 34th. When we arrived there were maybe 100 to 200 people gathered around the spot. Mostly it was neighbors at that point, several photographers, a couple of people with megaphones. Flowers were being left, there were candles in the snow. Chants were being chanted, yes, but there was a lot of silence, too, heads bowed. It felt like being at a funeral which, of course, is what it was. By the time we left there were more than two thousand people gathered.  The mood was of unspeakable sadness and grief.

Mostly what I feel these days is pain. But I also feel as alive as I have ever felt in my life. Desperation has an energy all its own.

By the next day, anger and fear felt like the predominant emotional states. People were figuring out how to respond. That work had already begun before the murder: how to be alert to the presence of ICE, how to protect vulnerable people wherever possible. As it was in prison, so it is now: community ties amplified and grew.  People have each other’s backs. That part of it is a beautiful thing to see and to feel a part of. People stand watch in the most affected neighborhoods in order to alert neighbors to the presence of ICE agents as they sweep through restaurants, hotels, school playgrounds, hospitals, and peoples’ houses. Demonstrations and vigils happen all the time. This city, which can sometimes seem almost asleep at the wheel, is suddenly wide awake.

As has always been the case in my life, my main way of responding to political outrages is through writing and reading. Although writing is solitary it is also profoundly connective as all writers and readers know. On my bad days I feel paralyzed and scroll through the news. I don’t have the bandwidth to respond. On my good days I am angry and alive to the moment. It helps to read. I have come back again and again to Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Report from a Besieged City.” Herbert had lived for many years in Soviet-occupied Poland.

Even for a solitary like me sometimes it is impossible not to take action of a different kind. E.E. Cummings has a character, Olaf, say in his poem, “i sing of Olaf glad and big” (a poem based on Cummings’s  imprisonment during WWI), “There is some shit I will not eat.” We are at the “there-is-some-shit-i-will-not-eat” moment now in Minneapolis.

Eventually, of course, ICE will go elsewhere, but as after a rape, the effects of their occupation will not end with ICE’s departure. We will need to keep helping each other and we writers will need to keep asking—through our writing especially—for the help and understanding of others.

Mostly what I feel these days is pain. But I also feel as alive as I have ever felt in my life. Desperation has an energy all its own. When I feel trapped by what is happening in my city, I can feel depressed, but sometimes a wild energy fueled by desperation kicks in. All kinds of things can happen then. Ask the protesters in Iran; ask those who protested during Prague Spring. While it is true that occupations and dictatorships don’t last forever, while they are in force terrible things happen and their after-effects follow. Writers and poets will respond. They always have and they always will. Countries under occupation often produce amazing writers: look at Chile and Hungary, Poland, and China.

The desire to bury the trauma of it once ICE leaves will be strong, but we need to not do that.

I think of Anna Akhamatova’s great poem “Requiem” written during the period of the Stalinist terror in Russia. At the beginning of the poem in a short section called “Instead of a Preface” she writes (in the Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward translation):

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):

Can you describe this?”

And I said: “I can.”

Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.

Yes. We can describe this. We can describe it with cellphones, with poems and, eventually, with stories, novels, memoirs and art. We are describing it already in the many conversations and group chats that are happening all the time. We are describing it in the demonstrations and marches and moments of solidarity, as happened yesterday in an office with a woman I had never seen before and will never see again. Somehow we began talking about the presence of ICE in Minneapolis. I said, “What are you doing to stay sane?” She said, “I am talking to people just the way we are doing right now.”

I thought I had finished writing this letter this morning at 9:30 am. I looked out the window, saw a long sedan with darkened windows pull up next to our apartment. Two ICE agents got out. The timing was unbelievable, but there it was. I threw on my winter coat and ran down to the doctors office located two floors beneath our apartment. I assumed the agents were headed there and I wanted to warn the people working in the clinic. They, however, already knew and were prepared with volunteers already in the office to document whatever happened. As it turned out, ICE was after people working in a hotel elsewhere on the block. At the hotel, too, I could see people had gathered to photograph the ICE vehicles, their license plates and the agents inside their cars. One of my neighbors who had been videoing them came back into the building where we both live and said, “I have never been more proud of Minneapolis.”

Here is the beginning of the Herbert’s “Report from a Besieged City,” as translated by Alissa Valles, Peter Scott Dale, and Czeslaw Milosz. It seems a fitting way to end this letter:

Too old to carry arms and fight like the others –

I was mercifully given the supporting role of a chronicler
I write down – not knowing  for whom – a siege’s history

I have to be precise but I don’t know when the sigee began

two centuries ago in December September dawn yesterday

we here are all suffering from the sense of a loss of time

we were left only with the place and an attachment to the place
we govern ruins of temples ghosts of gardens and houses
if we lose our ruins we will be left with nothing

__________________

P.S.

As everyone knows by now there has been yet another murder by ICE agents of a Minneapolis citizen since I finished this letter. My wife and I heard about the killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti just minutes before we were to go on a weekly zoom we have with friends from the States and from Italy. I went on briefly to tell our friends what had happened and that I needed to attend to it. I also asked them to pray for us. Even though I am not a praying man those were the words that came to me. My wife and I sat on our old white couch and watched the images and heard the details. We “attended” as best we could.

Each murder removes another layer of the false sense of normalcy that I hadn’t realized was so deeply embedded in me. And the “other shoe” continues to drop. We have no idea where it will end. I keep thinking of the woman in Akhamatova’s poem who says, “Can you describe this?” And Akhmatova responds, “And I said, I can.” I cling to the idea and the hope that we—not just poets and writers but everyone here in Minneapolis with a cellphone camera and eyes to see—will describe it. The desire to bury the trauma of it once ICE leaves will be strong, but we need to not do that. If there is to be any kind of a future we can believe in, it will need to include the truth of what is happening in these days, in this very moment right now.