June 8, 2017 First Person Where I Wasn’t When Manchester Bled By Tom Benn The Manchester worker bee, as depicted in a mosaic on the floor of Manchester Town Hall. Like a nightmare from the past To the sound of splintered glass … What kind of times are these? They drive you to your knees —“A Person Isn’t Safe Anywhere These Days,” by the Chameleons, a Manchester band I was eight and watching Saturday Westerns with my maternal nana in her Moss Side maisonette when the IRA bombed central Manchester in ’96. My nana had a color TV, but she preferred to watch the world in black and white. I’d helped her drain the settings. She had a budgie called Bluey and an Alsatian called Blacky and a serpent tattoo on her thigh. We were eating grapes. But my mother is convinced we weren’t. Not when the bomb went off. Years later she told me she’d heard the news before we left the burbs; she’d taken me to see my paternal nana in Wythenshawe that day instead, avoiding town. Read More
May 24, 2017 First Person My Albania By Brian Cullman A postcard of Albania, ca. 1910. Some people wake up at four in the morning wondering if they’ve left the light on in the kitchen. I wake up in a cold sweat wondering if there’s some country that I’ve forgotten, some place on Earth that’s slipped through my fingers. For many years now, I’ve collected music from the farthest reaches of the planet. I’ve found tapes of music from islands in Indonesia where drummers build their own instruments and eat them after each performance; records of Eskimos who sing into each others’ mouths; forty-fives of South African bands that sound just like the Sir Douglas Quintet; and records of Mongolian houmi singers who can hit three notes simultaneously. When I can’t sleep, I go wading through my collection like Scrooge McDuck swims in his money bin. And so I panicked when I awoke one night—this was now more than thirty years ago—and realized that I had no Albanian records. Not a one. And I didn’t even know where to look. Read More
May 4, 2017 First Person It Is Known By Rajeev Balasubramanyam From a 1952 Air France poster advertising flights to Corsica. As France flirts with political Armageddon, my mind returns to the gentleman with whom I shared a flight in 1996. I was returning from India on an Air France flight bound for Paris. He was sitting to my right, an unshaven, tousle-haired man in his thirties who smoked incessantly and refused all food, drinking only coffee. I asked him where he was from and he said Corsica. The Corsicans, he explained, were “the most dangerous people in the world,” and he showed me the tiny knives tattooed on his shoulder. I can’t be sure, but I believe each represented someone he had killed. I asked him if he had enjoyed his time in India and he said, “I hate it.” He was “too sensitive,” he explained: the poverty hurt his feelings. I asked if he had liked the food, at least, and he replied, “French food is the best in the world.” When I suggested this was a matter of opinion, he banged his fist on the pullout tray and said: “NO. IT IS KNOWN.” Read More
April 27, 2017 First Person Permanent Resident By Alexia Arthurs The lingering anxieties of growing up undocumented. Alexia Arthurs. Photo by Kaylia Duncan. I’m trying to remember when I first knew I was undocumented. We all were—my mother, my brother and sister, too. It showed itself in our lives. In Jamaica, my siblings and I had idyllic childhoods, with backyards to run and play in, and mango trees for climbing, and there was a time, for a little while at least, when my father would take us to the beach on Sunday mornings. He was a pastor, and his job required frequent relocation; my childhood is mapped by the houses we lived in and the church congregations we visited. On Ward Avenue, in Mandeville, my sister and I watched our cat give birth in a closet, and when we lived in Clarendon, I remember how the spikes in a church-graveyard fence went through a little boy’s leg and he was taken to the hospital. One August, we moved again—my mother took us to New York, leaving behind my father, who had been abusive to her and was less than interested in me and my siblings. My mother taught high school in Jamaica, a respected position in our community—I remember going to the market with her and the market men and women would call out “Teacher!” to draw her attention to their stalls. Now, she taught in day cares in Brooklyn where she was paid three hundred dollars a week. We lived in tiny quarters, for a time the four of us in the same bed; my clothes were purchased from thrift stores; and when the time came, my maxi-pads came cheaply made in large boxes from the dollar store. My mother taught me to stack one on top of the other, so I wouldn’t leak. It would take twelve years before we finally got our papers, when I was twenty-four. I’m twenty-eight now. Read More
April 27, 2017 First Person J. Stands Up By Marie Myung-Ok Lee John Singer Sargent, Studies of Clasped Hands, for “Apollo and the Muses,” 1916–21, charcoal on laid paper. My son, J., has many medical issues and severe cognitive disabilities. Yesterday, at one of the endless meetings we have about said disabilities, my husband and I were asked to describe how J. got that scar on his face. We shifted, almost in shame, as if it were someone’s fault. It wasn’t. So one of us explained how one day, J. was in so much pain from his gastroenteritis when he came home from school—this is our guess; he can’t communicate what he’s feeling or what motivates him—and we weren’t able to get him his medical cannabis in time. He often bangs his head on things when he’s hurting. That day, he happened to be standing by a window. He put his head right through it, slashing his face open on a jagged piece of glass. The developmental psychologist then asked us if J.’s ever tried to hurt us “with malice.” My spouse and I considered. We have scars from J.’s bites everywhere—I have one on the web of my hand and another on my left breast, where he bit me in fear after seeing a dog while I was holding him. My spouse has his own scar on his face, for which he, the least vain person I know, is considering plastic surgery to have removed. It looks a bit like a pimple, makes it difficult to shave. And who wants to look at that every day? Read More
April 26, 2017 First Person Losing By Brian Cullman They questioned some of the scholarship kids first, boys with cheap-cut shirts and shabby jackets—the ones who tied their neckties as if they meant it, not with the shrug of boys who’d been born with a tailor in the next room. This was at a boarding school in Pennsylvania, high on a hill overlooking a factory town where shoes were sold with metal tips, so if you dropped your hammer you wouldn’t break your toes. Next they questioned the rougher kids, the ones who’d give the gym coach the finger while he was watching, ones who laughed in chapel and smirked during grace. Read More