Memoirous

I left off my last post in the Bebelplatz in Berlin, atop the glass covering the Empty Library below. The swirling colored lights bouncing off the buildings added to the hallucinogenic feel to being there. I wasn’t quite sure where I was. Yet, watching the movie Origin , I recognized the location and déjà vu—personally and historically—washed over me. It’s happening again. Book banning. Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste , upon which Origin is based rests on the premise that the othering of Jews in early 20 th -century Germany and how we treat people of color here in the States informed each other, The writing and examples in the book are irrefutable. The end of the film goes back to an interview Wilkerson did with a subject who as a young boy, white, growing up in what is presumed a southern town, though I guess it could have been Illinois, when his Little League team wins a championship and is rewarded with a day at a town pool. The whole team goes, even the star player who score...

I went to see the fictionmentary: Origin written and directed by Ava DuVernay based upon Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: Origins of our Discontents . It takes a particular skill to adapt nonfiction to the screen; you’re actually telling a couple stories at once and most or all of it has to be TRUE. On a personal note: I couldn’t stop crying through the entire viewing. Am I highly emotional? Maybe, but I’m the kind of person you want in the middle of a disaster because I tend to keep my head without panicking. But once you start intuiting a lynching—I’m gone, and the movie opens with the murder of Trayvon Martin, the young man/teenager who was killed merely for walking home in the rain on a dark night wearing a hoodie. You know the end of this story before it even begins, and you get a sick thud in your belly just watching the Skittles slide across the convenient store counter. It’s all going to go so bad. It is a complicated story to tell, weaving the history of black oppression in...

Lately I’ve been exploring transcendent moments. I’ve tried to let go of the strictures of dance, override the bodily chemical reaction of fear, the memory of shame that surrounds the times I’ve allowed myself to move and react with a whole heart to a spiritual impulse. But it’s hard. Since my divorce I knew if I wanted to travel, I’d have to go alone. It’s okay, I almost prefer it, then I don’t have to worry about if someone else is hungry, overtired, their feelings. I only have to worry about me—and getting lost. When I traveled this past fall, I’d already overcome many anxieties that come from traveling solo—with a bike. I managed to get me and my bike on the train to Berlin despite the fact that it seemed I had no real seat assignment, despite a fellow passenger telling me in English that I must have a valid ticket to ride. Thankfully, when the person coming through the cars asking for papers scanned what I produced from my backpack, all was settled. Then at the Berlin station, h...