Sundays in the suburb

Sundays in the suburbs.

I remember the despair of the landscapes, out of which emanated an unnamable sadness. A desperation permeating the entire being, penetrating every pore of your skin. Desolate, sticky, haunting and relentless.

Arriving in places where boredom is almighty. Carrying the brunt of the deep, and almost unbearable melancholy they impose on us.

Their silence, their abundance of palpable misery. Our sense of powerlessness. Fighting against the oppressive weight of their strength.

Rejection, fear, and an overwhelming desire to flee! To flee, as fast as we can.... Or, at least, as far as we can.... in order to save one's life.

Not to see anymore. Not to feel the scars anymore . Not to breathe this oppressing air which reminds us of our loneliness . of our crazily ungraspable own human condition.

In confrontation and fighting is the strength, the victory that makes a poem of life. 

Knowing how to integrate the pains of the world, its injuries and its ugliest scars, its dirty tricks, its hard blows. Facing them in order to grow up, serene. To achieve the unspeakable happiness, where the slightest breath of life and any atom of the surrounding nature becomes a precious gift.

Time for a sacred silence filled with a thousand teemings of life's musicality.

Sundays in the suburbs. Boredom.

The static and persistent boredom. Palpable. Grey heavy silence of solitude.

In this false monotony you have to create your own havens of happiness. To survive to destructive boredom. In the midst of all this, to build a bubble, a refuge. 4th floor, in the middle of my books, my films and of my first poems, I realized that we also could never be bored in all the love and freedom they bring us.

I remember that a teacher had done a survey, one day in high school. The question was: 'What are you most afraid of in this life?' My answer had been: boredom!

Boredom that sticks to the skin, devouring you from the inside. An outrageous vacuum and a lack to fill. The revolt by the creation. A flight toward the multitude of the world.

Days spent in Paris. Sometimes, chilled to the bones. Sometimes, the heat. The unbearable heat of the smelly subway. Taming boredom by writing. By photographing, the traces of the life all around. To put them into words and images. To face them. To become them.

By the window I can see the poplars, gently bent by the cool wind. An inspiration for my first poems. They are like an harmonious and coordinated dance. They form a hedge along the working gardens that extend beyond. Sometimes I go there with my best friend. Her parents rent a small garden where they go on rest days and on the weekends. There is also the municipal swimming pool nearby.

Always through the window: I can watch the planes taking off or landing. We live just a few miles from Orly airport. Coincidence? My father works for an airline company. He is working on engines' planes' prototypes and I want to be an air hostess later. I want to take one of those planes. Not just look at them cross the sky. I, too, want to travel. To escape the boredom of the suburbs and find true life, hidden beyond the sky.

The shopping mall is the only real place of 'leisure'. Open all year round, even on the weekends. There, I can see films for only 10 francs. Many young people of the neighbourhood meet there. But I, myself, do not belong to any 'group' and I'm often going alone or with my best friend.

Sometimes we take the bus. Other times (often), when we have no money, we cross the vast cemetery of Thiais which offers a direct and shorter access at the mall. We walk every time with haste in the vast aisles where you could get lost. Exceeding the graves of some famous people and others of perfect strangers.

This is one of the largest cemeteries in Europe. It is every time an 'adventure' to walk through it. Especially when the night begins to fall and we have to quicken the steps even more. Letting out nervous laughters by dint of scare and excitement.

When I go to Belle-Epine (It is the name of the shopping mall) I do not always say it to my mother. She is afraid of the 'bands' who 'roam' there .'Dodgy' guys who can sit idle there for hours, lazing, penniless, smoking weeds. Young rogue. 'You never know what can go through their head'.

Down the block, and in the stairwell: the feeling of a first 'toll' to cross. Mom grits her teeth. I casually try it head high. Almost by provocation and with the near certainty that the 'evil' can NOT be. I think that these are young people like me. Young people from the city who have the same opportunities that I have.

It is not known as a disreputable suburb. It is rather quiet on the whole, with a residential area of detached houses and reasonably sized buildings.

With yet, occasionally, a horror bursting out. when we were busy thinking of something else, thinking we had been finally spared. Sometimes, terrible echos in the news.

Lydia had been at school with me. Mom forbade me to go through the fields again, behind our building, since then. We learnt it from her mother, at the bakery. A neighbor.

6:00 AM. It is still dark. My mother did not let go of her bag. In a protective and desperate reflex. She was dragged several meters by a moped. Her face all scratched and bleeding, torn clothes and still trembling: that's how I found her when I went to see her at her work, like every morning, on the way to school.

They did not take the bag. Statement to the police the same day. Unanswered. Current news item. Banal for the suburbs. My father made the tour of the district by car every morning for nearly a month but never met my mother's agressors. Here, it reminded me of Charles Bronson in "Death Wish '! He said he wanted to find them and scare them, these kids! Smooth morning, with now irreproachable silence. Like elsewhere.

Violence is everywhere. Violence is nowhere.

It is hidden. Where you least expect it.

It wears masks. It hides behind silences, pretenses, adorning itself with lies and subterfuges.

For a while: a reflex.

Now I would keep a low profile, walking along the houses fences, at the risk of being jumped over by a dog! To look straight ahead. Forbidding myself to watch, to answer anyone, to talk, to say. A fragile vigilance that my natural reverie defuses after a few meters. The innocence regaining the upper hand.

Discomfort. Suffocation. A moment of paralysis. A leak outside. Taking the breathing air. And then: the voluntary amnesia.

I guess my Today's adult mind would have disarmed the 'enemy', threatening him, ridiculing him in in his vain attempts. But young age's vulnerability is always an easy and a tempting prey for the weak.

Maybe to write. A window that suddenly appears as an evidence. Obvious. A door agitated wide open. Letting out a blinding light of excitement. Like musical notes that sparkle and burst and sometimes evaporate from the velvety black smoke and acrid unbearable smell.

Hidden, stalked, spit in an impatient urgency, a necessity. The vibrating beauty of the words like a music facing the ugliness and injustices of the world. Not to 'tell' but to 'make feel'. To let see and to let know. Trying to restore, or transmit the smells, the sensations, the colors. Even the more unsustainable ones.

We do not always choose what we see. The images sometimes spring, like an aggression, an assault. An hijack. A rape of the spirit.

What to say or not to say? What is the weight of a word blown awkwardly, into despair and misunderstanding? Received by deaf ears? What do we choose to show or not? What can we choose to say or not? What are our own 'masks'? The walls that we build around us. These protecting and robust propellers for our dreams and desires

The schoolbag is heavy on the way back, between the classroom and my home. Heavy with a thousand words, dreams and ideas that nourish me with their seducing beauty and their magnanimity. Me, opening the prospects for a bright, multilingual and colorful futur.

In the empty apartment, just after my father's death, all these thoughts invaded my mind and my heart again like a wave of multiple and contradictory feelings and emotions that cannot be mastered, but that just 'Are'. Thirty years in the suburb.

Thirty years later. They are just there, still incredibly alive and powerful.

This boredom, I wanted to flee then. I was now realizing what it really meant in my real life. My childhood.

This tabby, that I lost in the rain and never found again.

Each room, now empty and impersonal. Remains steeped in thousand smells of a thousand memories, familiar gestures, regular, daily, accurate. The smell of daddy's tobacco and his movies fragrance.

Appointment at 2:00. The caretaker is late.

I look down, standing before the closed door of the building, freezing and tired after hours of train, subway and bus. I do not even have the keys to return to 'my' home!

I hope I see no one I know .. No neighbor who has known me since childhood and who will be surprised to see me there, waiting in the cold. What? who? Where? Why? How? I don't want to answer to any question at all. I just don't want to talk.

I unfold an inner prayer. Feeling so tired and so lucid. Aware that this moment is an irreversible passage. I do not want to see anyone. I do not want to have to express my pain, my perplexity. I do not want to have to explain anything. I just want everything to be done quickly.

Leaving permanently the place where my family lived for 30 years is almost as if I buried my father for a second time. but at this point, I also realize that it is my childhood and teenager's memories that are buried now. The logical flow of things.

The page turns. These thousand familiar moments with their smells, their unique colors. This building. This vulgar grey block planted in the cold of an autumn suburb.

Departing from it, returning to it. Joys and pains.

Childhood treasures vanishing at that precise moment, in this place that has now changed so much that I do not even recognize it anymore.

We belong to the places for a moment. They never belong to us. And then we carry them within us as a part of ourselves. Until they become memories that escape us.

Can does this affect only me? What meaning can all this have for someone else? Is this a question to ask? Can I question the need to write?

Inventory: cold, methodical, impartial. Inspecting the smallest hole in the wall. I am no longer in my home. I suddenly feel like a stranger in this place. I'll maybe even have to pay for any damage found. No, actually, all is well. The toilet bowl is slightly chipped, but hey, he does me a favour!

Nothing to say. It is over. No looking back. It's all in the memory now.

I'll take the next bus. Then the next subway. Then the next train.

I'll drown myself again into that crowd of accents that I know so well but to which I do not belong any longer. Another 'me' in a place that is no longer the same. I will join my Province of 'adoption'.

I will not go down at the school stop, close to the shopping area, or at the public library.

I will go straight on. And wait for the next train.

It's always like that. It's always far, the suburbs.

Danielle Baraka (edited on Spring 2016)