What is There to Say?
When it was announced that André 3000 was going to release a new album, I, like the rest of the world thought. rather stupidly, we were getting another Outkast-style album.
It’s strange to recant this, a supremely millennial experience, but my first exposure to their music was watching a bombing, on my knees in the carpet, looking up at the television in my grandparents trailer. My grandparents had cable and the news played “Bombs Over Baghdad” over the live feed of Baghdad. That song was also the prized beat for showing off how fast you could shake your ass. Long before the word “twerking” entered the social lexicon, girls were teaching me how to keep up with the beat. That beat. It’s one of those details that feels meaningful about the meaningless of an age—that the same song was my late teen background for both war and parties.
When André 3000 said this new album wasn’t going to be Outkast-style album, well that wasn’t a surprise. After all, we got Idlewild from him in 2006, which kicked off a decade plus of artistic exploration in fashion and music. As an older artist, now I get it, but back then I was in my 20’s and hadn’t watched any artist evolve over time, only “re-invent” the same thing. Artists were all about “reinventing” or later “rebranding”. André 3000 was evolving.
I listened to the new music when it came out—a woodwind album. No lyrics. It’s playful and exploratory. I listened on a walk and had to focus. It’d been a long time since I’d listened to a piece of music I could not predict.
But it was his comments during the album’s promo cycle that caught my attention most. He sat with GQ and talked about the expectations for a rap album: “Even now people think, Oh, man, he’s just sitting on raps, or he’s just holding these raps hostage. I ain’t got no raps like that. It actually feels…sometimes it feels inauthentic for me to rap because I don’t have anything to talk about in that way. I’m 48 years old. And not to say that age is a thing that dictates what you rap about, but in a way it does. And things that happen in my life, like, what are you talking about? ‘I got to go get a colonoscopy.’ What are you rapping about? ‘My eyesight is going bad.’ You can find cool ways to say it, but….”
This really stuck with me, because, in so many ways, I am finding myself with less and less to say as I get older. I’ve become less angry, less choked on things, even if all the reasons I’m angry have stayed the same. In many ways, it doesn’t feel authentic to talk about this endless suffering—not even my own. It feels, honestly, rather pointless. I think I understand, listening to the wandering woodwinds of New Blue Sun, why the wind blew André this way.
“colonized” from Twitter
I haven’t been quiet about Palestine, but I haven’t posted about it like I used to post about such things. Why the change? It’s complicated. It’s important to share, to see, to spread the word. I’ve especially appreciated the Jewish voices who have spoken—both about their fears and their cries of never again means for everyone. I used to think that having this voice online, this platform, as small as it was, meant something. That together, our voices raised, we might change things. But when I had that platform, “a voice online” where people listened, I had no true voice in my own life. When I had a true voice in my own life and also online, no one could bear to listen to me.
Watching what’s happening, I reminded again that in suffering you are either invisible or culpable.
Invisible
The disappearing is the worst. After my divorce, I was hungry and alone, working two jobs to make the ends not meet. Nothing about my life was comfortable or comforting and I couldn’t—didn’t—hide it. I felt acutely the turning away of people I had thought friends, or at least friendly. I felt culture sweeping past me, the world churning on like a storm blowing overhead and then leaving me, stripped and naked in total silence. I used to think being an author, having that accomplishment, meant I’d be spared this part of suffering. But suffering spares no one.
I spent those years pleading to be heard, pleading for others, pleading for a better world. I was finally free to raise my voice—and I did in big ways and small ways. I marched in the streets of DC, was tear-gassed, shot at with rubber bullets and took my kids to protest. Once, the truss plant I worked at got a new executive and at the end of his month tenure at our plant, I gave him an impassioned, thoughtful, capitalist driven plea to raise the wage from $12.50/hr to $15. I had listened to him talk about lavishing his only daughter with gifts and buying his beloved custom Mustang. The company was posting healthy profits. I used my own finances—bare but pristine—to show him that you could not live on this wage. I remember his face, the understanding dawning and then sunsetting just as quickly. He did not look at me.
I’m not sure he ever looked at me again. He could not, maybe. But that was just hopeful thinking on my part. Hoping I’d made some impact. In reality, he just felt he couldn’t do anything about it, so he moved on. That’s the invisibility I’m talking about. You are a tragedy no one can do anything about, so they put you out of their mind.
There were times I felt uncertain whether I was even human. I felt as if day by day, I was more transparent, less real. My partner was homeless for several years, not long before I met him, and he reported feeling the same thing. Of course it’s dehumanizing to live on the streets, to shit in an alley or drink water from the gutter (all things he did), but the most dehumanizing thing of all is when the world looks past you. As if you are already a ghost.
Culpable
Not worse, but certainly no better is when people think you must deserve to suffer. This past year, I’ve had to use my voice to shepherd my children through the investigation and arrest of their father. Many people were kind and sympathetic. But many people were not kind—not even to the innocent children involved. Their father’s crimes became their crimes.
Of course, I was not surprised when people blamed me for what was happening—isn’t that being a woman, to be the one truly at fault for the crimes of men? But it surprised me how often that culpability extended to my children. As if they did not deserve to be saved. Once, during a harrowing 911 call, a dispatcher delayed getting my children help in order to lecture me. How had I even let my children into this dangerous situation? She demanded to know, continuing to delay help in order to scold me. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t risk angering her. I explained I had already been in contempt of court and this situation was the result of a legally binding resolution. A ceasefire I could not violate. Not until this moment of just cause. And even then, I was at risk. What is a “just” cause when you are already guilty?
The pervasive myth is that courts favor mothers in custody cases, but it’s not even remotely true. When men ask for custody, almost all of the time, they get it. Especially when they claim alienation, which their father was. In a study from the Department of Justice, reported by Forbes,
“Even when the father’s abuse was considered by the court to have been proven, the mothers who were alleging the abuse still lost custody in 13 % of the cases. By contrast, fathers lost custody only 4% of the time when a mother’s abuse was considered proved. Most stunningly of all, in only one out of the 51 cases in which a mother reported child sexual abuse while the father cross-claimed alienation did the court credit the mother’s claim of sexual abuse.”
I knew these statistics before this year, but I could not fathom how it truly happened. Now I know, but I am still helpless to make it make sense. I’m still traumatized from that day, but also this last year. Palestine began only a few months after that phone call. When the first reporting began, I just sat there, staring at my phone, thinking “oh, so this is how it happens.” I used to wonder, when I was young and the world seemed new, how these things could have truly happened. I assumed that, with all we knew, it could never happen again. But now I see, it’s always been the same. Half of the world will find them culpable by nature of being born, and half the world will pretend as if they can’t see anything. And what can you even do against it?
Nothing.
What is There to Say?
I have been quieter, partly, because I am traumatized and voiceless. I am afraid of being back in court, with my social media, this newsletter, everything, laid out before a Duke University graduated, rural southern judge, against my ex-husband who is a soft-spoken, humble appearing, federal police officer.
But I’ve been quiet too because I have nothing to say. What is there to say? Please notice this great tragedy? People notice. This is wrong? Okay. Mostly we post for the benefit of one another, not really because anything changes. I think often of that executive, the dawning and setting of understanding almost simultaneously. After that, he would never hear me again.
The people who were able to help me through this year or help even back when I was dangling by a thread, were people who could use their power or privilege to materially impact my life. Groceries. Laundry detergent. A boss who used what sway he had to get me raises, but more so, used his power to give me incredible flexibility to take care of my children during the work-week and COVID. A state police detective who doggedly pursued help for my children—eventually getting them connected to grant supported therapy. Even a pediatrician who listened and prayed over us (with permission). I was desperate for any prayers, to any god. Maybe one of them would listen. But most of us have no way of materially impacting Palestine. We can’t even send money.
I do not say this to say posting online about tragedies small or global is a waste. It is sometimes the only thing you can do. It was fundraising online that paid for the lawyer when I ran out of credit and savings, allowing us to actually limp to a resolution. But whether it’s this past year or the knowledge that suffering will always be, always continue, never resolve; I cannot bear to post impassioned pleas. What I can do—all I can do—is enter into their grief so that they do not disapear.
I feel like I’m performing,
like nothing about what I’m doing is real.
As if what I’m wearing underneath my clothes
isn’t a bathing suit
but a ghost.
No one can return
those villages to the hillside,
it’s over forever,
this is a fixed truth.-Dalia TahaListening to the wandering harmonies and errant sounds of New Blue Sun, I understand why André sat down to make a rap album and this was what came out. I think it’s probably deeper than he said to GQ. It’s not that there’s nothing he could talk about, but more like, at this point, what can you say?
You sit at the doctor’s office and war continues, in a new place, in the same old way. Friends die. Addicts relapse. Fathers abandon you. Mothers offer you to the streets. Homes are bombed. Children are left to die. Hearts are broken. How can one body hold such suffering? When will I be permitted to die? And yet, the sun rises again, blood red over the sea, and you are some kind of safe today, the definition of which is always changing. But, irrevocably, you are still alive in that cold river of grief. Suffering remains. Words fail. All you have left to remind you that you are still human, not a ghost, is some kind of pure expression—from your tears to a flute.
Dawn broke on our heads.
Endings were cut down to size.
Our little ones’ feet
rapidly turned
toward the sky.
Time set itself aside
and places shut their eyes,
like a child with words
that gray behind her lids.
Ceilings tumbled
waterfalls of stone,
and under the rubble
the last perceived image
hangs: a final painting
sculpted on our faces.
Alone we grow old tonight,
weave hours and wear them,
gobble the terror that runs
down our kids’ mouths.
Who will devour
our rusted lips? —Rawan Hussin, Gaza