Full: Be Somewhere
un-places, frog choruses, and deep community
In belonging: a culture of place, the bell hooks book I return to the most (along with all about love), she quotes essayist Scott Russell Sanders:
“It is rare for any of us, by deliberate choice, to sit still and weave ourselves into a place, so that we know the wildflowers and rocks and politicians, so that we recognize faces wherever we turn, so that we feel a bond with everything in sight. The challenge these days, is to be somewhere as opposed to nowhere, actually to belong to some particular place, invest oneself in it, draw strength and courage from it, to dwell not simply in a career or a bank account but in a community…Once you commit yourself to a place, you begin to share responsibility for what happens there.” pp 67-68
Perhaps it is because I have always considered my own sense of belonging to be a hemispheric concern, my identity to be one woven–from continent to continent–across oceans and generations through circum-Caribbean routes, that I initially resisted attending a work conference at a Sandals resort in Barbados. Such resorts have always struck me as the kind of “nowhere places” to which Sanders refers. Places sort of set atop another place but not of it. Places where one’s bank account and the nation of one’s currency in said account might actually be the deciding factors in one’s ability to dwell there.
But my intention this lunar cycle was to practice asking for, listening for and receiving help from ancestors and any helpers, guides and collaborators they or the universe might send my way. And I did need and ask for help. I had been edging towards burnout for months and the chaotic intensification of destructive politics leading up to and in the wake of this election has not helped. Everyone thought my resistance to this trip was weird anyway. Maybe my ambivalent concerns over air travel, and resort-going as imperialist self-care (at worst) or merely lazy and uncurious (at best) was only so much hand-wringing I told myself. And anyway, hadn’t I vowed to release expectation around what form the help took when it arrived?
Here’s what happened. I went and it was amazing. I took the advice of friends and colleagues and carved out plenty of time around the meetings, presentations and awards dinner to DO NOTHING. I read fiction, ate too many pastries at breakfast buffets, drifted aimlessly on pool floats, left news-delivering devices in the room and lifting face to sun, gave my mind complete permission to press pause on its always running recordings of lists, plans, and worries. Here’s the truth. It was a kind of healing and self-care. A rare and sparkling respite complete with wild lime-green parrots, topaz waves and virgin piña coladas.
I am still entertaining gentle inquiry around the systemic and personal reasons why I–or any of us who can take a trip like that—have to fly hundreds of miles in order to do it but it’s important that my body had the opportunity to recall what it feels like to relax. To be ok not doing.
And yet. The entire experience had an uncanny palimpsestic quality about it. This sprawling resort seemed a kind of enclosed overlay that was simultaneously rewriting, distorting and obscuring the histories and placeness of this place. I know I was able to unwind there in part because Sandals is an un-place. Even though its manicured flora and astonishingly underseasoned food offered a precisely calculated balance of local exotica and comforting familiarity, I was unable and unwilling to fully give in to the VR fever dream. Partially because the presence of my own browner-by-the-day body by the pool elicited stares from middle aged white folks who had paid good money to participate in a fantasy of white leisure undergirded by noiseless, gracious natives who only spoke to ask if you’d like another rum punch.* These stares were confused and at times blatantly aggressive. Wasn’t I on the wrong side, they asked. I felt a version of this tension as well. There certainly was no side for me within the Sandals enclosure and despite the trans-atlantic histories that bind me to this country, it was not my homeplace.
The “health” pool offered a quiet alternative to the DJ-fueled party vibe of the beachfront infinity pool. One afternoon though, the amplified bombast of soca and dancehall broke the hushed lull, chasing many guests off to their rooms. A man’s voice invoked perseverance and dedication through a crackling megaphone. A growing crowd responded in cheers. Curious, I started a conversation with the bartender about the Sandals employee team-building event that was ramping up just over the fence near the resort entrance:
“Sounds fun!” I gestured across the fence. “Is this just for employees?”
“Yes, for employees. For the team.”
“Oh, nice. Are you all unionized?” Smooth.
“New hall? …I’m sorry, What is it?” He leaned in, struggling to hear over the soca.
“Are you all unionized? The employees?” I said louder. I could see my husband out of the corner of my eye dipping back into his car magazine, embarrassed.
Bartender: “I don’t understand. You need ice?”
“No, no. Nevermind” I said, shaking my head. “ I was asking if Sandals employees were in a union. A labor union?”
“No, he said, relieved the exchange was about to come to an end. “It’s just a party.”
Indeed. The exchange was an inflection point for me. It shone a spotlight on my own ever-awkward positionality, shaped as it was by my African-American-ness, my white collar sensibility and too much higher ed and earnestness, but it also underscored the ways that these “no-where places” discourage efforts to peek past the “party level” for a glimpse at what might be being written underneath.
Sometimes, the placeness of the place broke through to meet me though. In the handful of shared laughs and unguarded conversations, in the flash of piercing heat in dishes that had somehow made it past the culinary censors, in the demanding pull of the tides and in the ever-present nocturnal whistling of the frogs.
A quick google search confirms I am not the first traveler to grow besotted with the tiny Barbadian whistling frog ( Eleutherodactylus johnstonei ). I found their loud, incessant chirping enchanting but difficult to identify initially. It was a chirping: nocturnal bird or insect? It was strangely mechanical: some kind of environmentally friendly sonic pest deterrent? It was so loud! It took an internet search for me to link the sound to the little, nearly translucent frogs I had seen clinging to the wall along the staircase to our room. They were about the size of your thumbnail but those tiny torsos inflated to mighty bellows! The frogs’ whistles accompanied us on our way to and from dinner and on our late-night strolls. Their music lulled me into reverie as I sat on our moonlit balcony. Their “gleep-gleeps” have been playing in my mind’s ear nonstop since I got back. What were they trying to say?
In his book Deepening Community: Finding Joy Together in Chaotic Times, Paul Born describes three levels of community: shallow, fear-based, and deep. I think the whistling frogs were reminding me of the centrality of listening to our ability to move past the shallow and fear-based towards deeper community. They were reminding me of that ring-shout structure central to black music across the circum-Caribbean whether its soca, dancehall or R&B, Malie Donn, Rihanna, or Kendrick at the Super Bowl—call and response. They were reminding me that no matter how refreshing the punch or reflective the pool, “self-care is a misnomer, as care is a collaborative activity, [not enclosed, but always] a commoning.” They were reminding me that even as we take time when needed to rest and restore, that we have to stay tuned in, we have to listen towards each other and towards what’s possible, and we have to act from our (home)place–wherever that is.
Now, as the legal stitchings of our truths and values are being systematically ripped out, is the time to follow Sanders’ advice and be somewhere. Get to know your wildflowers, neighbors and your politicians. Now is the time to invest in and commit to your [home]place. Go to meetings, make calls, research how to support vulnerable communities. Insist on experiences of caring and being cared for that are deep, mutual and grounded in reality.
I arrived home from Barbados to news that presented more assaults and challenges than any single link will bear, but also in time to hear the first of the spring peepers, distinct from but always related to their whistling cousins in Barbados. Their chorus was a kind of sonic homecoming and healing I hadn’t known I’d needed.
***
Where is your place and how are you committing to it? How are you listening in to the call and response of deep[er] community?
xx
*I love glasses and always notice them. Collectively, the employees at this resort sported the best eyewear I’ve ever seen. It was a personal joy to see the way these frames–quirky, bejeweled, nerdy, chunky–defied the pale grey anonymity of the resort uniforms and insisted on the gorgeous individuality of the women wearing them. Across oceans, we are always gonna flex when and where we can.