An Open Letter to USA From a Divided Citizen

They had the agenda to divide us, and they succeeded. Divided, we fall.

The irony is, we are not outnumbered. We women, queers, non-white people, differently abled bodies — we do not exist in the margins. We are the vast majority. And yet. Our voices have always been marginalized or silenced altogether.

From this grounded place, I consider ideas of freedom and independence. How these words relate to our bodies, our agency, and authorities over the same. The fact is, our personal agency is regulated by many authorities, including laws of nature. We are trapped inside our bodies, their inherent limitations; many of us existing in bodies more limited than average.

Likewise, we are trapped inside our beliefs — a structure made of 18-inch concrete walls built by propaganda and reinforced with the steel mesh of fear. Fear is a powerful force originally meant to help our far-flung ancestors survive in the face of predators. Our brains are wired with a careful circuitry that overtakes all logic and floods our limbs with adrenaline so we can run or fight or play dead — all in service to surviving.

You were constructed by people who exploited this circuitry. Similar people are doing the same centuries later. You have always been obsessed with independence, declaring it long before I was born. I squeezed out silently into your light and air and understood it, from my animal body, utterly dependent as it was, to be a lie.

Please consider the following examples, all within my personal knowledge:

[EXHIBIT ONE]

I might have been eleven or twelve when I took my sister to the shower myself. Nurses were short staffed that day and Mom ran an errand, so when it came time for her shower, I volunteered.

The Glasgow Coma Scale gives a range of numbers to represent the different stages of coma based on response to external stimuli. By that scale, my sister was at a level nine, meaning she responded to her name by looking at me, she was able to sometimes focus her eyes on me, and if I made a face at her, she would mimic and make the same face back, much like a baby.

She sat robed and glassy-eyed in her wheelchair, which I pushed up close to the shower stall. Inside the shower was a waterproof armchair. My first task, and the hardest, was to maneuver her into that shower chair. I was hesitant and afraid. My sister stared at the wall, her eyes unfocused, her lips pursed a little as if she were waiting for a kiss.

I bent down and kissed her, put my mouth to hers. There was a sensation of nourishment in it, like I was a baby bird feeding from the mouth of my mother, bitter tasting and unpleasant, but necessary and automatic. I helped her out of her robe, bending her forward and pulling free her arms, then letting it collapse open around her, cascading over the sides of the chair, revealing her.

My eyes stuck to the deep red scar on her throat where the tracheal tube had been; it was sunken in, tender and raw in the context of her pale naked body. Scars were everywhere: squat ankle scars, long knee scars, nearly indistinct, smaller scars around her pelvis and on her arms. The untouched places, her thighs and breasts, looked sculpted from soft, pink and white clay. I tried to keep my eyes there; it seemed to tame the fiery grief and fear licking the insides of my ribs.

I leaned down and hooked my arms underneath hers, my hands clasped behind her back, hugging her. I stood still there, cheek-to-cheek with her. Then I counted to three, whispered the numbers in her ear to prepare her for the lift. I waited a few beats after three to see if she would respond at all, if some part of her would go tense with effort to stand, but nothing happened. I pulled her body up on unsteady legs and she fell forward against me.

I held her tightly to my chest, pushed my hips in against hers to brace her weight. I was nearly as tall as her and strong enough to hold her up, but too uneasy to try moving right away. We stood there like that, me holding her naked body in my arms, pressed together like petals, breathing. I remember the weight and the helplessness of her. I held her tighter, wanting to collapse into her and meld and disappear.

The heat of our two bodies became overwhelming and I started to sweat. The pivot, swing, and lower maneuver to get her positioned safely in the shower chair was the trickiest part. I tried to see it in my mind before attempting anything, but I only saw myself dropping her, letting her go, crumpling under her, failing. I considered lowering her right back down into her wheelchair and giving up, going back, but Mom needed to know that I was capable of this, that I was strong enough. I needed to know.

I stepped back with one leg, leaned forward just slightly, flexed my arms and back into a rigid framework, turned us both from the hips like a dancer, and lowered her slow and graceful to the seat. I pulled away from her carefully, almost regretfully. Something had happened. I knew it even then. What was so tragic and meaningless for so long, what up until then had been nothing but hollow, agonizing misery for us all, somehow magically, although briefly, filled with dense purpose.

If there were such things as souls that existed before and beyond and in spite of our bodies, they would have wanted that moment to occur; they would have set up the conditions for it, and in its happening, would have been pleased. To have my big sister lean on me like that, naked, dependent in my arms, thick with complicated history and implications of an even more complicated future, covered in scars. It was a sad and colossal gift.

[EXHIBIT TWO]

The final two hours were the hardest. I crawled out of the tub and dragged my incredible weight to the bed. There, my waters were manually released. In them was a sticky black substance that meant we had to head to the hospital. I was shrouded in a robe and quickly loaded into a wheelchair.

Not much later, in a hospital bed, I was consumed with an animal urge to push like I’ve never pushed before. I did, as hard as I could, so hard a film of sweat covered me. In that push all the pain in my body disappeared, replaced by pure power. When I stopped, when I came up for air, the pain cascaded back over me like lava. After a few rounds of this, the baby’s heartbeat slowed. They gave me oxygen, told me not to hold my breath.

On my face was an oxygen mask, which I periodically batted away like an aggravating insect. On my left wrist was a pile of bracelets—the maroon string from the gift Jerel had given me when he said yes (with a knitted scarf for our baby), my mallas, plus bracelets given to me by my friends (during a ritual in which we welcomed the baby’s soul into the body)—all talismans to encourage me on. In my left arm was an IV—antibiotics to prevent a certain infection the baby might get from my vagina.

Otherwise nothing covered my nakedness. I crouched on the bed, primitive and wild, grabbing hold of a squat bar and pushing and pushing and pushing for my life, for the life of my baby, for it all to be over. After two hours, it was time to throw everything I had behind the penultimate push. In the midst of it, I heard and felt a crack low in my back accompanied by a sharp, white hot pain so piercing I temporarily lost consciousness. Later I learned that this was the sound of my tailbone breaking.

Moments before the final push, everyone in the room stared between my legs and cheered, “almost there, almost there, I see the head, I see the head!” As I gathered what negligible strength I had left in my spent body for one more heave, it occurred to me that I might die, that this last one would bring another whole body out through my pelvis and tear me completely in half and kill me. I cried, mumbling that I couldn’t, but it was as automatic and inevitable as the next inhale and so I pushed and tore and broke and out he came, silent and grey and motionless into the room.

There was a still moment before bodies exploded into action. No letting the cord stay attached awhile. No immediate delivery into my arms. Urgent attempts to save his life trivialized all these, as well as the long anticipation of learning the baby’s gender, which someone revealed by calling out the obvious, he’s not breathing! They took him away and instantly I went mad with terror, screaming.

When his cry came, his body was placed on mine. On contact, he peed, the hot liquid spilling over my sides, mixing with the blood and fluids under me. The relief I felt was just as hot, just as liquid, washing me clean. Skin to skin, I held this new human and looked into his big, clear eyes. In this moment, I understood. It’s why I had spontaneously spoken his name three years prior. It’s why I had been so driven to become pregnant and have a child. Because it seemed he had always been here.

[EXHIBIT THREE]

Six more police officers surrounded the door of the RV, pulling the handle, trying to enter. The door was locked. One officer produced a sledgehammer and broke the lock, then police rushed the home, hands on guns. Incredibly my friend placed her own body in front of her husband’s in an instinctive motion of protection, until her arms were seized and twisted behind her back.

While passing through Tennessee on their travels, my friends had docked at a WalMart parking lot in Franklin. They turned off the engine, and lit a cannabis cigarette, purchased from a dispensary in Michigan. Within minutes, barely halfway through their "nightcap smoke," the first pair of Franklin police in jeans and bullet-proof vests approached their windows. Step outside, they said, we smell marijuana. My friends asked for more information, including badge numbers.

Officers threatened to tase her as they placed handcuffs around her wrists. She and her husband were cuffed and ushered out of their home without shoes or phones. They were put in separate squad cars. They were not mirandized. Meanwhile, their home was ransacked, irreparably damaged by police officers. In my friend’s words: they “behaved like a White mob coming to drag a Black man from his home for a lynching, further enraged by our articulate audacity.”

My friend’s husband is a seasoned conflict resolution facilitator. She is the Poet Laureate for the State of Wisconsin, whose tenure has been designed with the goal of uplifting incarcerated writers.  They have volunteered in carceral spaces for nearly twenty years.  They live and work as Creative Change Agents. The are also two Black travelers with a late model RV who pulled into a WalMart in the richest county in Tennessee only to be violated within ten minutes of parking. There can be no motive other than profiling. 

Now, I joined my friends along with the ACLU of Tennessee, activists, and other allies to publicize this commonplace injustice and to hold the officers and the City of Franklin accountable for the violent invasion of their home. Together, we demanded that they see this extraordinary couple, the trauma and harm they suffered while claiming their agency over their bodies, the damage caused by the officers' unlawful and careless search, as well as the personal and professional toll of being terrorized, abducted, and wrongly jailed. 

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Please accept the foregoing exhibits as true and correct:

USA, do you see now, the truth is that we gain freedom not through declaring independence but through surrendering to its beautiful gift of an opposite. Our weight turns weightless in many hands. Our helplessness is turned inside-out, overwhelmed by help. We balance the injustice of unethical applications of human power with the brilliant minds, voices, and alliances we possess. Where we find ourselves the most powerless, it is through those doorways that we pass into a level of freedom vaster than we knew possible.

If we abandon the lie of independence, USA, we don't have to be afraid of losing it anymore. We don't have to suffer our independence. By "suffer," I mean we feel it with misery and distress in every beating cell of our animal bodies; the worst part is not the physical discomfort but the powerlessness we feel to extricate ourselves from its awful tendrils, which seem to coil around and poison our whole collective mood, our collective outlook, our very sense of the world.

I reject it, USA. I might grouse and wilt a little under the illusion of independence, but I can also see that all we need is our own essential sense of self, which does not negate the reality and necessity of our inherent dependence: on water and food, on gravity and motion, on clean air to breathe, on a certain range of temperance in our environment. But most importantly, on each other. What would happen if we celebrated our dependence on each other, if we saw it for what it is: humanity's greatest strength.

Lovingly,

Your citizen

Photo by Nicole Roberts