Remembered space

Tonight begins my second round of travel for the hip-hop project associated with the Keep-Mills Research Grant. This round will be the biggest, most grounded, and perhaps most creative and challenging aspect of the project. I am going back to Seattle, for approximately a week, to revisit the city where I discovered hip-hop and where I got some of what might be regarded as my early education into race politics and the power of building community alliances.

There is much that I wish to say on this topic, and it will be rambling. For tonight, I will speak briefly about geographies of place, and meanings that are put into space. On the long flight from Albany, NY, to Seattle, I read two books: the first was a slim volume entitled Possibilities, published initially in 1977 and reissued in 1983. It is a collection of reminisces and writings by Helen Merrell Lynd, one of the co-authors of Middletown and Middletown in Transition, the two foundational texts of the Middletown Studies archive on Muncie, Indiana, my hometown. The second book was the rest of Vivek Bald’s newly published Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. I will focus for now on Bald’s text.

I had criticized the text’s first two chapters for trying too hard to imagine a life for which no real documentation exists. The text becomes considerably stronger as Bald delves into the lives of early twentieth century South Asian immigrants for whom there are stronger historical records as well as descendent memories and a published memoir. In reading the book, I came to feel that perhaps the title is misleading. The book is not about Bengali Harlem as much as it is about lost histories of a group of people in particular periods of time that are centered on particular places. One of those places is Harlem. But there are others, too.

Bald, near the end of the text, notes that Habib, one of the individuals about whom he writes, had a fondness for walking. “Habib was someone who enjoyed walking through his neighborhood engaging in what his son Alaudin describes as the ‘art of conversation.’ A typical daily circuit would have seen Habib chatting in English and a little Spanish with his Puerto Rican neighbors on his block, then walking up to Paul’s, the Indian-owned jewelry shop on East 103rd, where he would sit and gossip for awhile in Bengali and English, then up to Syed Ali’s restaurant on 109th Street, where he would have lunch with more of his Bengali friends and hear news from the subcontinent.” The day’s journey would continue into the area known as Spanish Harlem, a train ride to the Lower East Side, and finally a return to his apartment in East Harlem. Bald draws a connection between Habib’s physical mapping of his local geography to French philosopher Michel de Certeau’s discussion of how people take ownership of public space, or “the ways people transform the planned, imposed spaces of cities into actual lived places.” “De Certeau describes walking in the city as an act through which people forge unexpected paths, make the urban landscape their own, and thereby ‘organize a here in relation to an abroad, a ‘familiarity’ in relation to a ‘foreignness.’ ” (pp. 210-211). Bald goes on to note that in Habib’s case the walking was not just about claiming space but about “forging new human relationships across racial, ethnic, linguistic, and gender differences, and maintaining those relationships through daily interaction and exchange over the course of a lifetime.” (p. 211).

The De Certeau text from which Bald draws this insight is The Practice of Everyday Life, which I, too, have used for De Certeau’s depiction of stories as containers that hold the narrativity of everyday life in my writings on Muncie. Muncie, unlike New York City, is not a dense, urban, highly walkable space. Yet, I feel that the relationship building occurs.

Seattle, however, has always been my city for walking. From the time that I memorized the mneumonic for the downtown streets – Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest (Jefferson, James; Cherry, Columbia; Marion, Madison, Seneca, Spring, Union, University, Pike, Pine) – the geography of the city has held a certain logic, even as the streets do not flow in a straight, smooth coherent line but rather angle off and against each other at various points in the city.

        Nevertheless, the logic has kept me from getting lost, and over my two decades of walking the city, I have come to associate certain corners with experiences and memories. Some what I hope to do in the city is a memoir-esque mapping that I can then embed with the inner-city histories and memories of other things at the sites. The book that I am starting to envision would contain a poetics of street corners interspersed with histories of racial and ethnic community formation, and interviews and performances of hip-hop artists who do their work against this milieu. I am not sure that the poetics, the histories, and interviews, and the performances cohere smoothly together. They might be disjunctive narratives that fit more as collage in the style of graffiti, than as the unitary history that hip-hop seems continually to resist.