the demons of exhaustion: kate gale and white sloppiness
1. first, a bit about
MEEEE
I’m starting this post a little after 5 am; I’ve already
been up for an hour with Dash, who is teething or mildly hungry or maybe just
needs to pontificate. His new thing is closing his eyes and waving his arms
while shouting, “Ah blah blah wah!” I think he may be doing an impression of
me.
My point is I know a thing or two about being a tired white
person. The past week included mind-numbingly boring yet crazy-making home
repairs that resulted in me doing three solid hours of dusting; lots of
emotional work stress on AK’s end; and an all-clear cancer check (woo!) that
was front-loaded with a ton of anxiety and a margarita and a Klonopin and an
emergency mini session with one of Homeboy’s therapists. (“I think I need a
quick dose of some of that trauma-informed therapy I’m always writing grants
about,” I emailed Theresa.)
2. kate gale is us
By now, those of you who are more in the literary loop than
I am have read Kate Gale’s post “AWP Is Us,” which started as a riff on her
blog and then ran in the Huffington Post (which really needs to stop passing
off blog riffs and press releases as journalistic essays…but that’s another
post). To summarize: Kate’s point—I think—was that people are always
complaining that AWP is misrepresenting or under-representing them, and they
act as if AWP is The Man rather than a membership organization made up of
writers, including those doing much of the complaining.
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| Kate in a great necklace. |
But Kate’s point was quickly lost by the odd and sloppy
satire-type riff that followed, in which she adopted the stance of one of the
complainers, using her own identity (half Jewish, “30% gay”) as an example. It
was weird. It didn’t make much sense. It touched down in touchy territory and
then flitted away. It read like a part of a dialogue I’m only on the margins
of, and I think that’s part of the problem. It’s inside-baseball in a world
where there are only like six people on the field and a zillion in the dugout
and the stands.*
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| Meh, I'm like 87% gay. |
3. cheese &
crackers
No one really needs me to weigh in on this, but hey, isn’t
that what we do as white people? Add our own ah blah blah wah! to the conversation? So here goes.
A couple of months ago, a friend of mine started hosting
Cheese & Crackers nights for white people (crackers, get it?) to discuss
racial issues. At first I was skeptical—yes, the world desperately needs to
talk about and act upon racial injustice. But how could a handful of liberal
white queer women talking over wine and snacks possible help anything? Wasn’t
the idea just kind of…embarrassing? Cautiously intrigued, I left my Mexican
esposa (who likes to be invited to the party, both literally and figuratively)
at home with my Mexican baby and went to the first official whites-only event
I’d ever been to.**
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| The cracker blues. |
Good point, I conceded.
The topic of the night was white fragility, another concept
I was a little vague on, but when it was reframed as
wanting-to-be-down-and-liked, it made all too much sense to me.
I think Kate Gale wants to be down and liked.***
4. having it all
I’ve known Kate for about a dozen years, and I count her as
a casual friend. Ironically or not, Red Hen Press (which she co-founded and
runs with her husband Mark Cull) probably has one of the more diverse rosters
of authors out there. I’ve always been inspired by how much she does: In
addition to running a press, she teaches, travels, raises kids (now grown),
sits on panels, runs marathons, and
writes and writes. She blogs almost every day. Or maybe every single day. I
don’t know because I don’t even read
as much as she writes.
I’ve also always been a little suspicious of the breadth of
her endeavors. Maybe this is my envy talking, but for once I don’t think so.
Can you really do all of that without a lot of cutting corners and/or
semi-invisible help? Like so many arts organizations and nonprofits in general,
Red Hen is largely powered by unpaid interns. And I think Kate would be the
first to admit that she often writes her blog on planes or while watching
movies in hotel rooms. I.e., she writes off-the-cuff and when she’s exhausted.
The blog’s raw, clever, loving-my-full-crazy-life tone is
part of what I’ve always enjoyed about it; it’s what I like about her poetry
too, although her poetry is much more distilled and thought-out. Poetry is the
opposite of blog. As such, that particular blog post was a window into how many
white people act when they let their guard down. They
admit—just-between-us-white-folks-and-the-internet?—that they’re tired of the
tiredness of people of color. Even if they don’t think they are.
Of course, when a white person gets tired and sloppy and
slips up, the cost is hurt feelings and some internet yelling. When a person of
color gets tired and sloppy and slips up, the cost is occasionally but too
often life.
Spend five minutes around Kate and you will know that her
daughter is gay and kinda militant about it; I think she’s been out since she
was a young teenager. Kate shares this information like any proud mama, but
I’ve always been uncomfortable with how quickly she volunteers it. Was she
trying to ingratiate herself by showing how un-homophobic she was? She always
gave off a bi vibe herself (30%!); was she flirting? No, that wasn’t it either.
I think she just wanted to be part of an us,
while also perhaps enjoying the perks of other identities.
She once told me a story about traveling to South America to
bring home her nanny’s relatives, who were in some kind of danger. Kate Gale
has always struck me as the kind of person who has a nanny, feels a little
weird about having a nanny and will genuinely put her neck on the line for said
nanny, but will then make sure you know about it.
What she isn’t: a textbook racist, uncaring, all talk.
What she also isn’t: someone who can be content doing just
one or two things, a good listener.
5. the only bravery
How we act when we’re tired and stressed says a lot. Once,
in the midst of a tearful phone call with my friend Amy—when she was pregnant
with her twins and I had just been the subject of another birthmom disappearing
act—I confessed, “I’m a really good winner. I can be so kind and generous when
I don’t feel threatened. But right now I’m not the winner.”
In this moment, I feel like a winner. I have my family and my
health; I’ve fought incredibly hard for both, but I also know that a huge,
humbling part of my current good life is out of my control.
This past Tuesday night, I didn’t feel like a winner. I felt
a little like I imagine Xochitl felt when she thought, upon realizing that the
press that had accepted her work wasn’t going to serve her or her community
well, I can’t have nice things. Because
I had one nice thing (family), I was superstitious that I couldn’t have another
(health).
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| This is what comes up when you Google-image-search "family health." I love it when we all watch Dad and Sis play pat-a-cake for hours! |
It hit me—all over again and also sort of for the first
time—that I was trying to raise a baby and have a mental health crisis at the
same time. Who the fuck did I think I
was? I knew I had to choose my baby, and yet I also desperately wanted to be a baby, to just curl up in a fetal
position and not have to witness other people living their nice lives while I
proceeded to die of cancer.
Fr. Greg says kindness is the only bravery there is.
On Tuesday night that meant chatting with Dash’s daycare
teachers and hugging him and feeding him and getting the both of us to Villa
Sombrero and handing him and the keys to AK before my
margarita-and-half-a-Klonopin cocktail kicked in. It was the only way I could
be kind to both of us. It meant joining AK for a margarita rather than hounding
her to parrot reassuring cancer statistics back at me.
I won’t pathologize Kate too much, but I know she has her
demons, and I suspect they fuel her best actions—the true and good work she
does to make sure that queer writers, writers of color and otherwise outsider
writers are heard. She probably knows what it’s like not to be heard. But I bet those same demons mix dangerously with
her privilege at times, and she gets too busy trying to have it all to
recognize that the kinder, braver thing to do would be to pause and listen.
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| Xochitl in a great dress. |
*What? I don’t know how many people are on a baseball field.
DON’T MAKE ME UNDERSTAND SPORTS.
**I say “first official” because, well, I did spend the
first eighteen years of my life in Manhattan Beach.
***Isn’t that part of why I’m
posting this post? To think things through, yes, but also because I want to
distance myself from Kate on some level and therefore ingratiate myself to the
writers of color I know and respect. Because it’s all about me, right?
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