OPINION | When writers provide familiar details, they help us make sense of unfamiliar experiences
Quite simply, we are committed to writing it down.
We do so in recognition of the thousands of people who survive deprivations right before our eyes and the many more we can’t see, who are housing insecure and skimping on basic needs to survive; in recognition of the hundreds of years of systemic injustices that have left too many people dispossessed of wealth and over-incarcerated; the decades of federal under-investments in a social safety net.
Every week we put out our newspaper as a commitment to journalism’s role in societal solutions. We write about so much that’s difficult to convey, and in turn, I’ve found myself studying the work of war reporting.
Some time after the United States launched war in Iraq in 2003, I began reading the late Anthony Shadid’s dispatches. Living in Southern Maryland at the time, in a ramshackle house sunk into the wetlands that edged a highway, The Washington Post came to my doorstep, and I would scan for his byline, seeking some account of the daily violence inflicted on the Iraqi people by my government. Shadid worked to connect that war, and others, to readers in the United States.
I was also drawn to Shadid because his prose was so strong. A U.S. writer, he had perhaps more in common with his readers than those who suffered, but because he formed strong bonds, spoke Arabic and suffered the traumas of the war himself, he proved an able observer.
He wrote about wars in which the atrocities were far off from those who lived in the United States. With homelessness, it’s oddly different. Those of us who are housed share our geography with those of us who are unhoused. The conditions of extremity are overlaid, like a map upon a map, rather than a far-flung place. Yet there’s almost a spatial gap, or glitch, in which people in a camp village live on a separate geography from those of us who pass by.
But importantly, in both instances, those of us who are not suffering hold a share of responsibility simply because it is our government that disperses resources and makes decisions, and it is an economic system in which we are all participants.
“Some suffering cannot be covered in words,” Shadid wrote in his memoir, “House of Stone,” and yet, he tried anyway because this was his “daily fare in the Middle East documenting war, its survivors and fatalities, and the many who seem a little of both.” He did it by “searching for some telling detail.”
This is an act of translation: Familiar details are like landmarks on a map that guide us to what is, in fact, highly unfamiliar.
“I noticed the fragrance of cedars and pines,” Shadid wrote in one description of a bombing of Lebanon by Israeli soldiers. “Their smells seemed fresh and bracing, promises of renewal, until I discovered that the actual trees had been destroyed hours before.” That was how Shadid introduced his readers to the experience of obliteration from a bombing. Some scent of what once was there lingered.
I understand how it was that the scene of pine trees is fresh and prickly. I do not understand what it’s like to have a bomb obliterate it. The familiar details take us to the brink, and then, there’s a rupture. As a writer, Shadid had to determine where to place that rupture for his readers.
And is there a point in which unfamiliar details create a rupture so extreme that readers disconnect their empathy? Do the familiar details create enough landmarks so the reader can arrive at that point, anyway, like a path that leads to a cliff that, in turn, reveals a canyon?
This is one effort of both Street Roots journalism and our platform for creative writing from Street Roots vendors. In some cases, it is through the writing of people experiencing homelessness that our newspaper reports “some telling detail,” as Shadid describes.
William, like some of his housed neighbors, associates springtime with tax season. Randy looks forward to the Rose Festival, when the city is “hippity hoppity” again. Bronwyn takes a moment to write a pastoral poem celebrating the snowfall. It takes a moment to grasp that she did not return to the warmth of her cabin. The snowfall of which she appreciated was the snowfall in which she camped on a bluff in our city.
Despite being neighbors in the same region, the conditions of lives separate us as if we live on separate continents. Street Roots journalism seeks to overcome this distance, so we come to have a stake in each other’s lives.
Branching Out
Street Roots vendors bring you the news, but also, many of you build relationships. It’s been hard this year to have so many fewer opportunities for vendors and readers to interact. For those of you who have scant opportunities to find a vendor, we have developed a bulk subscription program where you can team up with others to purchase a minimum of $25 worth of papers weekly that a vendor delivers to you. Email branchingout@streetroots.org
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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