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)
