Here's Why Your Words Matter (Donald Intro) (11/14/2020)

Here's Why Your Words Matter | The Weekly Atticus

November 14, 2020

A recap of the week's writing at Atticus Review. Introduction by Donald Quist.

On election day I woke around 4 a.m. I made some tea and toast, grabbed my voter’s registration card, wallet, a cap and face mask. I prepared myself to encounter possible voter suppression. I imagined having to walk past armed Trump Army poll-watchers who might look at the color of my skin and try to intimidate me. 

I got to my polling place, a Lutheran Church, around 5:30. I was surprised by the absence of MAGA hats. I was surprised to see so many young people, college kids shuffling in their sweats and leggings against the early morning chill. I even spotted one of my former students. I can’t recall ever being so eager to stand in line. 

While waiting to vote I read

by Yoko Tawada on my e-reader. I highlighted the following quote with my thumbs: “And if we don’t get this not-very-much exactly right, we will not survive.” I read it over and over again. I thought about it when my turn came to take a ballot. 

I didn’t cast my vote until close to 7 a.m. By then the number of arriving voters had begun wrapping around the church. On the drive home I listened to the song

. A hopeful smile spread across my face as Rita Moreno sang,

Life can be bright in America

.

In 2016 I published a personal essay collection called

. It was about a lot of things but really the book was about—as W.E.Burghardt Du Bois puts it—how it feels to be a problem. I’m working on a follow up to that text now. It shares the same aboutness but it’s a little different. Since Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I’ve realized I’m trying to answer how it feels to be

told

that I am a problem. What does it mean to be reminded daily through national rhetoric, institutional regulation, and public demonstrations that large segments of this population don’t want me in America and don’t know what to do with the fact that I matter.

On election day, after I returned home from voting, I took my dog out into the front yard. A large pick-up truck with a pole for a flag depicting Trump as Rambo drove past twice, the driver staring at me behind his sunglasses. The same truck returned later that day, passing my house at a crawl with a dozen other vehicles sporting Trump flags and blaring car horns. Peering through my blinds at the parade I remembered lyrics from West Side Story again.

Life is all right in America (If you are white in America) Here you are free and you have pride (Long as you stay on your own side)

The Friday evening after election day. I was sulking about the close margins of the voting results. To raise my spirit, my partner recommended I reread The Carrying: Poems by Ada Limón. In the piece, “A New National Anthem,” I felt myself lifted. I raced a highlighter over, “like a match being lit /in an endless cave, the song that says my bones /are your bones, and your bones are my bones/” I felt a sense of hope for my country rise in me again. That hope was rewarded the next morning during a book festival committee meeting on Zoom. One of my colleagues interrupted a point he was making to let us know, “The Guardian has just called it!” As my peers vacillated between beaming and bemoaning the fact that Biden was not their most ideal choice, I remembered West Side Story and Anita and Bernardo singing on a NYC rooftop. Life can be bright in America, I thought to myself, if we can fight for America. Last week the world saw a victory against flagrant bigotry; as Biden said in his acceptance speech, it is a bend in the moral universe towards justice. I believe there could be greater triumphs ahead if we push humanity to do more than just what is enough to survive. This means doing what you can every day to make injustices in your community less everyday. This means making and teaching, and inventing creative ways to challenge as well as include. It also means showing up to be counted on days when numbers matter. There will be resistance to attempts to make a new nation where no one is ever made to feel like a problem. It’s crucial to remember the struggle to make life alright in America for more than just oneself is not a solitary effort. There are others toiling beside you, shining a light in an endless cave, sharing their bones. This is something I often have to remind myself of when I’m alone at a computer screen. Reading matters. Writing matters. If only for the fact that words help us find each other and allow us to define what and who we want to be. Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here.Donald QuistColumns Editor

ATTICUS NEWS

Looking for a good book? There's been a lot of new additions to our Reading List!

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

FICTIONHELL AND HIGH WATERby L.W. Nicholson"He wants to tell her he is all right now.He wants to give her a name.He wants to feel the river carry him away."READ ON

POETRYWHAT COLOR IS BEIGE?by Claudia Stanek"...and I wonder howa person old enoughto earn a diploma couldn’tknow its off-ness, itsless-than-pure whiteness..."READ ON

CREATIVE NONFICTIONALGORITHMby Melissa Matthewson"This is a list of directives for how to love: something precise, and even though I might not believe in this bullshit of soulmates, I think the number calculated while you reasoned about synapses and neurotransmitters was really about romance, about chances of meeting, about love."READ ON

SUPPORT ATTICUS!

We are able to bring you content such as this through the generous support of writers and readers like yourself. Please consider becoming a regular

today. All subscription levels include free submissions.