Easter was my favorite church service as a kid - bombastic doxologies and postludes on the organ, and a few years later, joining in the descants on my trumpet. It always felt larger than life, and usually the sun would stream in, marking a departure from the cold, dark depths of a Chicago winter.
This year, I barely noticed it coming. I've been distracted all week - by events in Tibet, the five years of war, by Obama's speech. I went to church expecting a lift, a message that we can resurrect ourselves from these ills, that we will rise wiser and kinder from the depths of a storm, a war, a dark period in American history. I didn't get that lift, so I'm telling the tale myself instead. What follows is hopefully a good expression of what I truly wanted and needed to hear this morning.
See, Tibet and Katrina are very intimately linked for me. I want to tell you the story, and hope that we can use it to write a better ending for all of us.
I was in Tibet in August of 2005 as part of a study abroad trip that went to Japan, China, Tibet, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and 14 different cities in India before a 2 1/2 month study program in Cochin, Kerala, India. I backpacked through Europe on my way home, visiting friends in Athens and family in Holland before heading home for Christmas.
We had already seen some amazing things and met interesting people, but Tibet was an experience wholly unto itself. This is what I wrote about it at the time:
Flying into Lhasa was a religious experience. We're chillin up in the clouds and then we start to see the himalayas... over the clouds. Then we descend and its mountains everywhere, the most enormous mountains you've ever seen in your life, huge and immense and imposing, and you get the sense that this is where continents collided, and it was all so overwhelming. I was crying, and so were a lot of people in our group. It was just incredible.
We could all feel the effect of the thinner air immediately. People were
getting out of breath just walking around the airport. We loaded on to our bus, which looks like it came straight out of the movie 'almost famous' (a 70s kind of decrepit bus) and began the hour and a half drive into Lhasa. The drive was amazing - the mountains everywhere, and rivers and valleys and honestly I can't even really describe it - you'll just have to see my pictures. The tour guide was talking but I didn't hear a word, I was hanging my head out the window and smelling the air and feeling the presence of this place.
We visited Potala Palace, the residence of the dalai lama (when he could still live here) which is the highest point in Lhasa. The view was just incredible, and the inside was filled with these unbelievable stupas (tombs) where the former dalai lamas are buried. The whole place smelled like incense and history. We also went to Sera monastery and walked around there. In the courtyard, all the monks (at least 150 of them) were doing exercises in small groups, and all the tourists were walking around snapping pictures and watching them like they were zoo specimens. It was definitely the most uncomfortable moment here.
The people here are just incredible. They are so friendly, welcoming,
beautiful, respectful, pious, hardworking... I wish I could remember every face I've seen here. There is such a respect for the elderly as well - children taking their parents to temple, grown children helping their even older parents to walk around and spin their prayer wheels, ancient looking people prostrating hundreds of times in front of Jokhang temple.
The people in the market were my favorite - I got my hair braided like tibetan women have here and the ladies who were doing it and their children and i all took pictures together. Even though we couldn't speak the language we could still laugh and make funny faces and it was one of my favorite moments from this trip.
This is the market, taken from the roof of the Jokhang Temple. Same market that was burned, cars overturned, etc in the riot photos. You can see Potala in the distance. Lhasa's largest prison is behind it.
We were overcome. Picking out one emotion or another was impossible. Maybe it was the heady scent of incense and yak butter, the thinness of the air, the leathered faces of old Tibetan women. We sensed the fragile balance, the simmering tension between Tibetans and Chinese. Our tour guide would deftly change the subject when we brought it up. He later told us that he would be imprisoned if he discussed the situation.
At the time we imagined ourselves unique, Americans crossing cultural boundaries to interact with total strangers. We were glad to have experienced Tibet while we could - because if one thing was painfully clear, it was that Tibet's culture was being constantly and forcefully eroded.
Shop signs were written in Mandarin; if they had a Tibetan translation, it was written underneath in smaller print. We even passed a large multi-story building that said "AMWAY" in prominent letters (No, I am not kidding). I was told that Tibetan children are schooled in Mandarin, and their second language studied is a "choice" between Tibetan and English, and many children choose English because of the job opportunities - squeezing out fluency and saturation of the Tibetan language. Potala Palace's only function seemed to be as a museum of another time. At the time we thought, five years, this will be completely commoditized. I felt even more grateful that I had been able to feel the presence of this place, look into the eyes of these people, share a small portion of their life. Overwhelming gratitude was really the only response, in the face of it all.
Cut to August 29, 2005, when Katrina slammed into Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, I was in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I huddled together with my friends, some of whom had family connections to New Orleans, in our hotel room, watching as Anderson Cooper showed us what was going on, and we cried as Mayor Nagin lost it on Garland Robinette's show on WWL Radio.
That day I had one of those moments of clarity when you can see every linkage, every minute connection in history, and the vast interweaving sets of actions and consequences. Karl Marx called it "overdetermination" and made it the logical cornerstone of his economic theory, rejecting the linear cause-and-effect structure of neoclassical economics. Using overdetermination, everything is simultaneously a cause and an effect.
We visited a war memorial that day - for the American War, as it is known there - that consisted of photographs and shrapnel pieces, displayed in a gallery setting. As I walked through, thinking about how events were unfolding in New Orleans at the moment, people thirsting and dying and how this whole city was being left for dead, I saw all the circumstances that had led to this: A president who never went to Vietnam and saw these atrocities; a callousness born of privilege that would enable a war of choice; a costly quagmire that pulled funds from levee protection, as CrashingVor so beautifully detailed yesterday; and a military squandered and stretched to the brink, unable to respond to the worst natural disaster in American history.
Three thousand miles from home, I found myself weeping for those bearing the consequences of the reckless actions our leaders gleefully entered into when they invaded. What hit it all home was that as I exited the memorial and looked out to the street, I saw hundreds of faces passing by, doing everyday things like buying food, going to work, picking up their kids - but these faces were the same ones I had seen in the photographs. Made visible was all their personal histories - maybe a father, uncle, or grandfather. Maybe a village torn apart by Agent Orange. An orphan, a rescuer. Land mines, missiles, jungle bunkers, every atrocity for war, every reason to be bitter, I could see in their faces. And yet, these people didn't hate me. Everyone in Vietnam was kind and helpful. They harbored no hatred, at least none that was outwardly expressed. This all stood in stark contrast to the actions of my government, and how we were "reaping the rewards" of our actions abroad, with New Orleanians paying the price for all of us.
Both places, Vietnam and New Orleans, were left for dead. From death comes life - resurrection.
I chose to respond to that day by dedicating the remainder of my academic career to New Orleans and economic justice. I served as a volunteer for a long time, wrote a senior thesis on the economic geography of the storm, and after graduation, moved here permanently.
Yet the issues that surround the recovery, and indeed, the resurrection of the city of New Orleans, those have not gone away. I am not the only one who wrestles with how to move from our city's death to the new day we are continually promised.
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How do we move from death to life? How can resurrection happen? It seems so improbable: from the depths of something horrible comes its opposite. From the finality of death comes endless possibility. It seems miraculous that we even have examples to point out.
I never found out Aunty’s name, but she would come in with her two small nieces about 3 or 4 times a week. They would play with me while Aunty was picking out the food for the day, and I would hold the girls’ hands to cross the street over to their car. One day in particular we were more busy than usual and Aunty mentioned to me that she wanted to talk to me whenever I had a free minute. I went over to her, put my arm around her shoulder, and asked her what was up. She wouldn’t look up, and was visibly distressed as she pulled her wallet out of her purse and dug around for a thick stack of social security cards, and began showing them to me. I... I... just wanted you to know... that the reason I come in here all the time... well, there’s 6 grandchirren... and... I just wanted you to know... I said to her, you don’t have to prove anything to me, I’m not the government, I trust you, and you do what you have to do, you’re welcome here any time. I told Dariane (age 6) that if she didn’t know how to read, we would teach her. She came in a couple times to read with us, but we didn’t see them around after that.
In Darjeeling, we visited the Tibetan Refugee Center. Darjeeling's border location meant its population was a mix of Bengalis, Nepalis, and Tibetans. The refugee center was founded by the Dalai Lama's sister-in-law, and she is almost as revered there as he is. The people at the center taught us more about the current situation in Tibet than we were able to learn with four days on the ground in Lhasa.
We got to sit and talk with some kids. They knew enough English to ask us to see pictures. When we told them that we'd just been to Tibet, they all crowded around to look at our cameras, squinting for pictures of Potala, which they had never seen.
I sat with these girls and showed them postcards of my university, something I had brought along as an easy way to share a little bit of my life in the US. One of the postcards showed Notre Dame Stadium.
The girl in the middle of the above picture - her name was Tenkyi - flipped through the postcards and stopped on the one with the stadium. She looked right at me and said, That's where... the hurricane... the people stayed.
Think on that a minute. A twelve-year old Tibetan girl living in a refugee center in Darjeeling, India, knew enough to compare this
to this:
I don't know whether she was disappointed that people had to stay in a place like that, or impressed that there was even somewhere to go. It was hard to tell. But I hugged her and thanked her, thanked her for even knowing what was going on. A twelve year-old girl in Himalayan foothills, and she knew about Katrina.
Anita was a young woman who came in all the time, and every time left with about 3 bags full of clothes. Her boyfriend Darrell had an impressive grill, 4 diamond teeth and a couple gold ones. One day they decided to have a full-on bedroom fight in the middle of Distro. There were no other residents in there, but my friend and I sat awkwardly listening to them discuss the crudest details of their relationship at full volume. As they got into the car and left, Anita yelled in my direction, Girl, when you get to be 37, the men in your life are STUPID and DUMB. And they will use you, for your body. So you best be sure you get PAID FOR IT! Anita came by the volunteer center a couple times for dinner, and one day asked me to give her a ride over to Gentilly. In the car she was talking about how she used crack sometimes just to relax, and I said, You gotta be careful with that stuff, it’ll destroy you. She said to me, how come white folks can smoke weed and nobody yells at them, but black people smoke crack every once in a while, and they get a f***in lecture?
How do we get from there to here? From death to life?
Whenever we had a huge truck coming in, we could count on Wes coming by to help unload it. We’d always give him extra stuff when he did, but usually he’d refuse. One day I was running Distro by myself and he stayed with me for about 4 or 5 hours, helping out and keeping me company. Another time, some other volunteers were driving the Distro van near his house and it broke down, so he helped them push it into his driveway and then he stayed with it all night to make sure nobody stripped it. When we kicked out the crazy guy from upstairs, Wes hung around to make sure he didn’t come back and hurt us. Wes had rats in his house and a lot of times they ate his food, so we tried to keep some good stuff around for him.
We help one another. We realize that we are not alone.
Henri Nouwen says, "in voluntary displacement we cast off the illusion of 'having it together' and thus begin to experience our true condition, which is that we, like everyone else, are pilgrims on the way. Through voluntary displacement, we counteract the tendency to become settled in a false comfort and to forget the fundamentally unsettled position that we share with all people. Voluntary displacement leads us to the existential recognition of our inner brokenness and thus brings us to a deeper solidarity with the brokenness of our fellow human beings."
I don’t have names to go with all the faces. For instance, the family that came in one day – a grandmother, a middle-aged man, and a young teenaged girl. They all looked very different and I asked if they were related. Only by the blood of Jesus Christ. We rode out the storm together, and now we’re family.
The call to solidarity binds us together. Out of death, life.
Voluntary displacement is solidarity with those who lead disrupted lives. And what is disruption, displacement, if not this: the waiting game. Waiting on a government to do right by its citizens. Waiting for the road home. Waiting for the Dalai Lama to return.
You don't think this woman knows the pain of waiting?
Or this woman, waiting for someone to listen to her as she speaks about the environmental injustices being waged upon her community?
"In a time in which many people can no longer exercise their human rights, millions are hungry, and the whole human race lives under the threat of nuclear holocaust, compassionate action means more than offering help to the suffering. The power of evil has become so blatantly visible in individuals as well as in the social structures that dominate our lives that nothing less than strong and unambiguous confrontation is called for. Compassion does not exclude confrontation. On the contrary, confrontation is an integral part of compassion." (Henri Nouwen)
This is how we resurrect the broken. Our call to solidarity is nothing less than this: we must confront those who seek to tear us down. It is our duty. It is how we continually perfect our union, by letting justice roll down like waters in a mighty stream, as the prophet Amos once said.
I greeted everyone who came in the door with a "Hey, how y’all doin today." And more often than not, the response I got was oh, I’m blessed. I’m havin a blessed day. I didn’t even know how that was possible. Every day, living in a ruined neighborhood with spray-painted death counts and 7 foot water lines, rats and roaches, families scattered everywhere – it seemed impossible to me that these residents could say I’m blessed. But they did. Every day. Even the ones who talked to me about the neighbors on their block, the ones who stayed and tried wading through 8 feet of the foulest floodwaters imaginable and drowned, or the ones who told me that a cousin had committed suicide over the weekend, or the ones who had lingering illnesses that just wouldn’t go away because of the mold in their home, they all said, I’m blessed.
"Honest, direct confrontation is a true expression of compassion. The illusion of power must be unmasked, idolatry must be undone, oppression and exploitation must be fought, and all who participate in these evils must be confronted. This is compassion. We cannot suffer with the poor when we are unwilling to confront those persons and systems that cause poverty. We cannot set the captives free when we do not want to confront those who carry the keys. We cannot profess our solidarity with those who are oppressed when we are unwilling to confront the oppressor. Compassion without confrontation fades quickly into fruitless sentimental commiseration." (Henri Nouwen)
This is how we perfect our union. This is how we resurrect our neighbors, our friends, our world family. We remember that Tibetans are our brothers and sisters. We remember that Tenkyi knows of the tragedy of Katrina, and that New Orleanians know of the tragedy in Tibet. We answer the call to solidarity, and we work for change.
Superdome picture from Agence France Presse. Henri Nouwen quotes from "Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life" published by Doubleday, 1983.