evitae.net

New York City, greatest city in the world, celebrities abound, and I have only met but a few of them, most often elsewhere. I guess I can attribute this to the fact that the few times that I am home, I don’t quite get out enough, and I certainly don’t live in the heart of the city, but I certainly expected my list to be longer than this. Note that I do not include my concert experiences (Black Eyed Peas with the Pussycat Dolls, Gym Class Heroes with The Pack) in this list.

• Terrence Howard: I was on an Amtrak train traveling between New York and Philadelphia (I’m not certain anymore of which direction) when this stunning young fellow dressed in a beret and a fancy coat, eyes aglitter, entered my car on the train. He certainly had that movie star glow about him, his glance somehow hinting at the notion that I should know who he was. At that time I had only seen him in passing as a villain in Martin Lawrence’s Big Momma’s House, so I didn’t quite get that he was famous until a woman followed after him, returning to her seat with a sheet of paper boasting his signature. I was too shy to confirm what it was she was holding in her hands, so I sat in silence and wonderment. It would be years before I recognized who he was, but this is one of those occasions I can say I regret that I did not follow my instincts.
• Angels & Airwaves: At the time that they arrived in the Virgin Megastore in NYC to sign copies of their debut album, We Don’t Need To Whisper, I really didn’t care too much about the band aside from the fact that Tom DeLonge was a part of it, which, in itself wasn’t a big deal. It was my sister who insisted that I attend the signing, especially since I had grown more appreciation for Blink-182 just as they made their exit (a replica of my experience of the boy band era). I hadn’t expected to be really excited about the event, but as we neared the artists’ table, (after a long line comprised of what was largely not even New York teens) I found myself bordering on fanaticism. I have to say that he was kind of boring though, with that eternal somber glower of his that he seems to have adopted especially since his creation of AVA. His band mates were a little more exciting, so much that in the two minutes I spent having them sign the album (which one of them neglected to do as I would realize on the train ride home) I was able to crack a joke with one of them. This experience would be my first taste of true, transient idolatry, the kind my father would mock me about as I sat in front of the MTV Video Music Awards almost every year of my adolescence.
• Luke Wilson: Sometime early last week, a series of trucks claimed the short series of parking spaces lying just outside the entrance to my dorm. As gossip travels quickest in a sea of women, I soon learned that a movie was being filmed on campus. I thought it was pretty awesome at first, especially since there was the prospect of meeting the film’s star and seeing classmates as extras, but now that no one will shut up about, I’m just about ready to have these people leave. There have been several occasions where I have had to go out of my way because they needed “quiet on the set.” Once was fine, but everyday I’ve had work? Not so much. The only good thing that has come out of this is my eyes-closed photo with Wilson. I’m still wondering whether I should post the photo here. I’m not a huge fan or anything, but as with the AVA experience, the excitement was there.

I guess if there is any point to this post, it’s the question of why we even care about celebrities. What is it that’s responsible for that excitement we feel in their presence? Do celebrities have the same feelings amongst each other before they’ve met? All it would take is for this person not to have ever been a movie or a music video, and we would care nothing about them at all. It’s like with Heath Ledger’s death. So many people that didn’t know him mourned him, when people like you and I die every day. Hell, children die everyday. Obviously we can’t be in mourning every day of our lives, but what made his death so much more significant? Until I am able to set myself aside from this blind idolatry, I don’t know that I can ever answer these questions. I suppose this is as prevalent a sin as any other.

Writing daily is far more difficult than I thought. It’s not that my social life or my thoughts are idle. In fact, there has been plenty on my mind, and given my loose schedule, lots of time for me to take a moment to reflect on it all. Most prominently the issue of my identity has been brought to light, and while roughly a week ago I thought it’d been put to rest by the thoughtful words of two friends who’d had similar experiences, it continues to haunt me in subtle ways from day to day. You’re probably as lost as I am, so I guess I’ll start from the beginning.

On the evening of Thursday, September 13th, I opted to step out of my comfort zone and attend a meeting for Sisterhood, an on-campus cultural group affiliated with Black women on campus. After over a year of avoiding the group since my freshman year for reasons I haven’t really found the means to articulate, I decided it was time to try and rekindle what little relationship or solidarity I had with “my own” on this campus. While the meeting itself was fairly encouraging, somewhat enlightening even, I did not come away without some damage to my stability.

For several moments I paced the campus cloaked in confusion, tears clouding my vision the way clouds dim the light of the sun on a partly cloudy day. I couldn’t understand why for years I was so sure of who and what I was, and all of a sudden I was cast into darkness as is a room at a motion so small and insignificant as the flick of a light switch. Suddenly the blueprints I’d drawn up of myself had become foreign to me - I had become foreign to me. I had so many questions, and as I tried to answer them through introspection, as I often do, I found my mind swimming in more confusion than ever.

Why was it that I found so little comfort in the company of others who looked like me? Why is it that I automatically sought to claim them as “my own,” and was that really even okay? What had triggered this sudden desire to step away from accepting people as people, and therefore everyone as “my own” and step toward focusing on the people others would assume I had “natural” ties to? I was happy with the community I had built around myself, even in knowing its tendency to be limited (not to be confused with closed) towards some racial groups, so why couldn’t I let sleeping dogs lie?

In these moments I suppose I felt as one of mixed heritage often does, as though I was forced to straddle the fence between one culture and the dozens of others I appeared to be a lot more more comfortable with. But as two of my beloved friends were so kind to remind me, no one was forcing me to do a thing but myself. It was okay to be what we decided to call “floaters” or “drifters” between cultures. In fact, the world needs these kinds of people. We are the liaisons of the world, and if the people we like best don’t look like us, well, there’s a reason for everything, and it’s not always so one sided. After hours of talking with them and others about this brief, but painful delve into myself, I felt a lot better, and the issue seemed to have cast itself aside.

That is, until this past Tuesday. As I said in the last post, I am taking an African American Literature course. Naturally some identity questions should arise from that, and I was well prepared for that when I registered for the class, but I didn’t expect it to occur at the intensity that it has. My professor for the class actually pulled me aside and asked me,

“Do you know your history, your heritage? How many Black people are there in America? What’s Juneteenth? Do you know whether your great grandparents were slaves? When is the last time you spoke to your grandmother? I’m sure she could answer these questions for you, but I’d recommend that you ask them before she passes. If you allow these questions to go unanswered, then slavery has succeeded.”

I stood there staring blankly at the woman, a nervous smile stretched across my face in a poor attempt to mask my ignorance and shame. Not only is she a professor who was asking me these questions, but she is my major adviser, my Praxis III adviser, and probably most interestingly, a (Black) nun. I was beyond uncomfortable, and confused as to whether I should be pleased that she is so interested in her students as to ask them to explore their histories and share them with her or pissed that the identity issue had reared its multifaceted head again. We agreed that I would do some research over the upcoming break, signed some forms for my Praxis III course, and I left her office. Was this all coincidence? I think not.

Less than a day later, I have even more to convince me that there is a higher force here prodding me towards looking into the past. On my trip to New York for my dental appointment, I stopped at a Chinese fish market for lunch at my mother’s recommendation. As my food was coming piping hot out of the fryers, a Black, grey haired, but otherwise well aged man of fifty seven years dressed in an MTA uniform, a tribal earring dangling from his ear, addressed the cook as “Hey, fisherman!” The Chinese man behind the counter smiled and the two men engaged in a conversation like old pals.

Immediately my interest was piqued, as I have always wanted to experience fishing, so once their little conversation was over, I surprised myself and asked him where he went fishing, as we stood in the middle of the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. Sitting at the table in front of me, he ate his fish, tomato, and lettuce sandwich, and we began what was for me, one of the most valuable intergenerational conversations I’ve ever had.

It’s a little weird sometimes, the amount of information total strangers will tell each other about themselves. The conversation could have easily stopped at, “Oh, I fish upstate,” but it continued so that twenty minutes later, I felt as though I knew as much about him as I do of my own grandfather. I learned that he was over 60% Native American (and therefore felt justified in fighting in court for the rights and benefits he felt the government owed him as such), that he was originally from North Carolina where in his day Blacks were still hung, that he fought in the Vietnam War (”They used to say we were ‘dinky dau.’”) where he was shot in the leg (which was in fine condition), but in spite of that, he harbored no ill feelings towards the Vietnamese and had in fact fathered a daughter (one of four children - the other three from other mothers) with a Vietnamese woman whom he brought over to the U.S. I was then inclined to tell him that my boyfriend is Vietnamese, to which he responded, “That’ll work.” I wasn’t really certain of how to interpret that, however. Dusting his hands off to brush away the crumbs from his sandwich he bid me a great day and stepped out into the midday sun to return to his bus, leaving me in a fog of awe and longing for grandparents who had as much history behind them as he had.

As I returned to my mother’s office to gather my things, say goodbye, and head back to Philadelphia, I again began to think of my identity. If this man had learned from a DNA test that he was a certain percentage Native American, what would the same test say about my family? What would it say about the pale complexion of my mother and hers, about the waves in my great uncle’s hair, and my own high cheekbones and the subtle red tones in my skin? I smell a thesis!

While I have regained stability in my identity with the acceptance of my being a “cultural floater,” I realize that what’s happening now is as important as what has already occurred. After all, it’s a cycle of ignorance that perpetuates the repetition of history. Better said, in the words of Marcus Garvey, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” Good night.