No. 38 - Agone with Pain, Agape in Vain

[Hey y’all - We are planning for this post to also appear later this week in Spanish on our Spanish based newsletter, Palabriña. This post is a little long, but let us know what you think in the comments or via los hearts!! ♥ Siéntete libre de suscribirte para leer en español y/o para practicar otro idioma. Please feel free to subscribe to read in Spanish, and/or to practice another language.]

While I cannot rightly point to why I thought, some days ago in November, that we had arrived at the anniversary of the Charleston church shooting, I found myself searching online to find when did the shooting take place. The A.M.E. church was the first of its ilk founded by the mutual aid society known as the Free African Society. One of the founders of this group, the formerly enslaved, Richard Allen, founded the church as a space for African Americans to worship without the racism, without discrimination. This space of fellowship, where nine were murdered as they gathered, holding hands in prayer, in a circle, with five others who escaped injury, is the oldest African Methodist Church in the Southern United States. The shooting, I find out, actually took place in June 2015, on the 17th day of the month.

Did I somehow think that an anniversary of some type of massacral event, some type of tragedy had taken place in these early days of November? I was sure of it, that some type of tragedy did happen in this first week of the month this day, which given the length of time is very much likely to have happened. But the slaveholding city of Charleston founded in 1670 did come up for me yesterday in an exchange with a family member.

One of my brothers wanted to know how far a town named Pineville, South Carolina was from a major center. I had spent a fair amount of time in Pineville as a child, which sits sixty-four miles northwest of Charleston. One of my sisters was good friends with a college peer whose family was from South Carolina, and we found our families growing up together, intertwined as cousins, playmates, friends.

At the age of five or six, my twin sister and I spent probably a good year, maybe more, in Pineville, South Carolina. In fact, we did our very first year of formal education at J.K. Gourdine Elementary School, with Miss Glisson, a teacher with a wonderful predilection towards using rhymes and rhythms in the classroom, as our first-grade teacher. Like many children in pastoral areas, we got into everything.

I believe we had bicycles, or maybe we just played on the road. We jumped over its ditches back and forth. We explored empty houses, and got burrs in our shirts. We went to a Baptist church on Sundays, dressing in flowered dresses and Mary Janes. We washed by hand our shoelaces every Sunday so they glistened in white against the black patch of our Mary Janes. This was not exactly a come as you is kinda church. We, I, loved Grandma Caroline’s cooking, most of it. I did not actually like the stewed liver, but her gravy stood on business. It was delicious. She also made some type of okra dish, beginning my love for slithery foods like the Senegambian dish soupou kandja, or bissab, a green plant found especially in the national dish of Senegal, thiebou djeun. Its taste piquant and sour, complete.

My husband John and I had gone back to Pineville for a visit about two years ago. The town sat, not far from Moncks Corner, South Carolina, a municipality with history that immediately gratifies even the superficial seeker of this country’s human trafficking origins. This corner of the round world takes its name after the Thomas Monck, a slave-holding landowner who branded his slaves with his name, "T Monck."

We stayed at Grandma Caroline’s on this visit, in a pretty and roomy–was it painted pink?—house not far from SC Highway 45. Actually, these days we call Grandma Caroline, Granny Rose. Though for me, I have sometimes not been sure how to call her: Grandma Caroline, Granny Rose, Mama Caroline, Mama Rose. I am sure as a child we just called her Grandma because that’s what she was to us, that’s what she is. But as I got older, and our families drifted apart, I never quite knew what words of honor to issue from my mouth, and subsequently did not twist my lips to call her much of anything. If I called her Grandma Rose, did that mean she was Grandma again? If I called her Mama Caroline, was she Mama?

As I think of the town I spent nearly two years in as a child, the palm trees dotting the landscape, the church we attended just down the road, the elementary school not much further than that, the plenty, plenty trees, and the long dirt road, I think today of a short story I recently read by the writer Mònica Batet, translated from the Catalan by Marialena Carr and Julia Sanches.

Though I speak a bit of Spanish, I am not very familiar with Catalan, understanding from a friend that it is a language rooted out of Latin, same like Galician, Portuguese, Spanish, Sardinian, Italian, Romanian and is spoken in Spain, France, Andorra, Italy, and Barcelona. The language took form in the 7th and 8th century. So, long time ‘go.

In any event, without giving much away, the story is set in a very back of woods town, deep country energy. A woman, the centered character, who goes unnamed, referred to by the prosaic she, gets married to a person from this country village. She moves to his home in this deep, deep forested area of whatever unnamed town his family is from. The story, titled “Tramsa, Tromsa, Tramso” explores an idea of a kind of collective consciousness, a collective memory that has particularly captured, or latched on to the anxieties of our she, Joan’s wife. Her husband is Joan and does go named in the story. After learning that his wife is seeing landscapes, hearing choral voices, music, seeing women with red hair, tracing the shape of her hands on paper, her husband calls upon a local doctor, a village doctor.

Surprisingly to me, the doctor is rather well-equipped to support this young woman, prescribing primarily talk therapy. The idea that a therapist was within reach of this small town amuses me, as it quickly takes me to a trip I took in 2014 to Pondicherry, India. I was pleasantly surprised, on this trip, that steps from the apartment building I stayed in while there, in this also dust-swept, aromatic, and truly nostalgic town in Southern India, was a sign for a psychiatrist, indicating her name and her visiting hours.

Tangentially, I had decided on this trip to share some of my own health sensitivities with my host should I present in any way, off. (I guess that is a good way of saying that.) Encouraged by a godmother, and, after having other experiences of traveling and becoming disoriented, this decision to reveal was frankly a life-saving measure. I found myself glancing, as I exited from the apartment property, there in Pondicherry, at the people coming in and out of her office. A young woman faintly comes back to me here. Absorbed in her thoughts, slightly disheveled in an area where people dressed both in color and tightly, that is, put together. Did she have a child with her?

But getting back to the story, thinking of Pineville, thinking of Charleston, and of this unnamed town, the doctor realizes that this woman is, perhaps, (later becoming, in fact,) calling upon an ailment that has been previously seen in other women, in places where there is little sun, particularly in winter months. What he finds is that the call of the voices, the siren of the music that the wife continues to hear, finally compels her to suddenly leave her home, her husband, mother-in law, and her eight-year-old daughter.

The character in Batet’s story recalls to mind a character in Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love. Again, I will not go into this too heavily, but the novel narrates the experiences of a female character, Saffia, and surfaces this notion of a fugue state, a state in which a person might travel somewhere but later have no recollection of doing so. In this, Forna’s work, Saffia-I hope I am remembering this well–winds up many miles, sometimes towns away from her home and family. Both dealing with the trauma of the civil war of 1991 in Sierra Leone, and perhaps her own trauma, the character has difficulty expressing herself emotionally and frequently disappears. It takes time for her family to locate her and bring her home.

Why this today? Why am I thinking of fugue states, foreign languages, traveling back in space and time? I guess Batet’s story stayed with me honestly because of how ardently linked it was to The Memory of Love. Forna’s novel is about 500 pages, Batet’s story maybe ten. The Memory of Love was one of the last full novels I read, probably a number of years ago. I remember that I had never quite heard of a fugue state, and I wondered if it was, in fact, a real phenomenon.

Did I somehow connect both of these stories to myself, to my own journeys, experiences of swiftly moving thoughts, winding themself through my mind, or me proceeding to places that I had not initially planned on being? I guess some of the malaise did land for me, their discontent and trauma as some degree of neurosis.

I do not have much more to add here, at this point, only to say that in a few 3000 days, or the approximate length of days it has been from the Charleston church shooting, it will be, God willing, near the anniversary of a day after I first met my husband. It will be April 2034, weeks before or after Easter Sunday. So, at this point today, we are some nine years before Easter Sunday, 2034. We will then be nearly nineteen years from the Charleston church shooting, and, I imagine, my baby nephews will be adults, also close to nineteen, able to vote, two years shy of fire-arm carrying age.

Will they have remembered or even known of the massacre? Where in the world will they be? Will I be? If I have left the city, will I be on country land like Pineville? Will I be content there? Safe from a massacre myself? If a massacre does occur that year, or that day, how far from it will I be? Or will I be there, at its center? Will I have walked there like Batet’s character or Saffia? Called by voices singing spirituals? Would those voices be of the Charleston Nine, or some other set of slain? If I walked to the sight of loss, would I have made it out? Why would I walk to the sight of loss? Why would I go to a sight of pain? To twice measure the length of loss is to cut at once into the site of love. To twice measure the gape of gain is to close at once the site of pain.

Tagged under: Charleston, Pineville, AME, Mònica Batet, Aminatta Forna, Fugue, Catalan