Search Results for: health

When Running Toward Yourself Looks Like Running Away

Illustration by Greta Kotz

Amber Leventry | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (3,796 words)

“No one is standing in your way anymore. Not even yourself.”Maryam Hasnaa, clairsentient and spiritual healer.

Once upon a time, not long ago, I presented as someone else. Like so many people, I’d received discouraging information about who I was supposed to be — from my family and from our culture — and I constructed a false identity, held loosely together by shame, alcohol, and obligation. The longer I perpetuated the lie of who I was, the harder life became, and the more I suffered. I was desperate to change; I knew something was missing, but I didn’t yet know what. I was terrified of making even one new choice because of all that was attached to the false ones. Just as one lie leads to the creation of many others in order to maintain your cover, deconstructing just one will inevitably lead to the unraveling of the rest of them.

The truth kept intruding on the false quiet I tried to maintain in my mind. I kept drowning out the sound of it with gin, until it got so loud I had no choice but to listen.

In the space of two short years, after a lifetime of uncertainty and denying what was true, I became committed to being real. I became sober; I came out as nonbinary; I left my female partner of nearly 20 years. I examined everything in my life that I thought defined me and realized in my rush to find myself I had never really been lost, just hidden.

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Addiction, Disorder, Disease, Call It What You Want: A Reading List on Alcoholism

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No one sets out to become an alcoholic. Life happens. And then life happens some more, and one day one drink is eight drinks is you get the idea.

I never got to meet my dad’s dad. He died just after my older sister was born, when my dad was 21 and became a dad for the first time. Even though Grandpa was an alcoholic — to the point Grandma divorced him over it — that’s not what ultimately killed him. That’s just what I’m afraid will happen to my dad.

Alcoholism falls into two categories: alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence. Growing up, my dad’s drinking habit fell into the “week or weekend, 12-packs of Bud Light don’t judge” kind of dependence. He drank socially, but his specialty was drinking alone in the garage late into the night. Sometimes my mom would become so frustrated with his drinking that she’d go off to her parents’ house to avoid it altogether, leaving my sisters and me behind.

On one of these nights I needed a ride to stay over at a friend’s house and opened the door to the garage. I found Dad in the drunken state I expected and asked him for a ride. After reminding him Mom had left a couple hours earlier, he stared at me with bloodshot eyes, eventually slurring out, “Can you drive?” Not legally.

It took him more tries to get into the passenger seat than it did for me to start the car (one), and he passed out not long after that. When I pulled up to a stop light, an empty bottle rolled from under the seat and hit the back of my foot on the brake. The person in the passenger seat looked like my dad but wasn’t my dad. He wasn’t the person who loved me, who I loved back. He wasn’t the person who went to work every day to support his family. He wasn’t the person who told the best stories and made everyone laugh. He wasn’t my dad. The person next to me was this thing — addiction, disorder, disease, call it what you want — that manifested itself when the sun went down.

I was 17 when he got his first DUI. Attempts at sobriety started piling up after that, with nights of seeing him shake and sweat under blankets. I was 23 when my younger sister died in a car accident. Dad got his second DUI soon after that. Life happens.

There are days when I hope there’s still time for sobriety to stick to him. But I admit, there are more days when I’m a cynic, a realist. I know his body has been conditioned over decades to depend on alcohol in order to function and no one is meant to live forever.

For both the hopeful and the cynical, what follows is a reading list on how alcoholism has been experienced by real people who have struggled and managed to survive. Cheers.

1. For Leslie Jamison, Running and Drinking Were The Two Quickest Ways to Escape (Leslie Jamison, April 2018, Vogue)

For Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, running and drinking became her escape from shyness when she left junior high.

Jamison describes how she trained to be a long-distance runner and drank her way through high school, literally drinking to the point of passing out the night before her graduation ceremony. She “finally stopped drinking entirely” at 27 and it was at that point when she learned she “needed to be released from that defining sense of self,” created by running and drinking, so that she could “meet the other selves that were in there, waiting.”

If running and drinking both offered a sense of release from myself, they offered it in very different—nearly opposite—ways: Drinking felt like transportation out of myself, while running transformed my sense of who I was. If drinking loosened me from the cloister of my body, then running involved inhabiting that body fully: sweat pooling in my collarbone, flattening my hair to my skull, coating my shins in layers of dust and grime.

2. Distress Tolerance (Kaveh Akbar, April 2018, Gay Mag)

Psychologists refer to “distress tolerance” as our ability as individuals to endure negative or painful experiences. “Alcoholics and addicts, whose lives are often spent lurching from one painful crisis to another,” Kaveh Akbar writes, “tend to display distress tolerances that are significantly higher than those of their sober peers.”

Akbar uses his own experience with drinking as a remarkable case study for this assertion. He describes how he once got into a bike accident while drunk, resulting in a shattered pelvis and a cracked vertebra, but also the discovery by doctors that Akbar had a two-month-old fracture on a different vertebra that he didn’t know he had. Possibly more remarkable is that this wasn’t the turning point for Akbar to get sober. That “took another couple years.”

The more you drink, the more you become defined by the drink, the more you look like a drink and smell like a drink and behave like a drink. In a blackout, this effect reaches its apex — you leave your body completely, and the drink is finally left to move unaccompanied through the world.

3. For Years, Alcohol Was My Only Comfort. Then It Nearly Killed Me. (Heather King, July 2019, The New York Times Magazine)

Heather King, a former aircraft maintenance technician in the Air Force, writes about her history of drinking and how she “felt as if [she] had to drink in order to function, or at least appear to function, as a normal human being.” Alcohol was her “lifeline.” When she nearly dies in a drunk driving car crash, and after her mother bails her out of jail, King realizes she not only wants to get sober, she wants to live “[f]or the first time in many years.” And her desire to live, after nearly 20 years of drinking, finally outweighs the desire to drink.

Related reading: Jane Brody writes about functional alcoholism in a 2009 piece at The New York Times.

What I appreciate most about King’s piece is that she’s a realist. She acknowledges the “struggle” she “fought” to become sober, admitting that “[t]he decision to get sober and stay sober, by no means easy, was the single most important decision” she has made in life. She’s honest that she couldn’t get sober for anyone else, not even her children — she had to want it for herself for it to last.

Alcohol became my solution to everything. I justified it by saying, ‘If you lived my life, you would drink, too.’ I convinced myself I could stop. After all, quitting was simply a matter of will. The Air Force had taught me resiliency and strength. What other tools did I need? But alcohol had me beat; I just didn’t know it.

4. I Hadn’t Seen My Addict Father in Years — Then I Ran Into Him on the Street (Jordan Foisy, August 2019, Vice)

In this intimate and matter-of-fact glimpse of what it’s like to grow up with an addict parent, Jordan Foisy shares what it’s like to finally meet the person they may have been all along.

After not seeing his dad for three years — as the title suggests — Foisy runs into his dad and the two make plans to have lunch the following day. What unfolds is hours of hanging out together and Foisy getting to see that while his dad has a coke problem and lives on the margins of society “garbed in clothes that look like a donations box sneezed on him,” his dad is also “funny, opinionated, hypocritical, charming, strange, and loving.” At the end of the day, though, Foisy is left realizing his dad is “committed to his drugs, and letting them kill him. He doesn’t want to get better because what kind of life is waiting for him on the other side?”

This piece begs the question: Does someone have to get sober in order to live?

A lifetime of movies had left me with these fantasies of The Great Conversation: If I had enough courage, I could engage my dad in a way that would save him, and by saving him, save myself. It would end in great heaving sobs between the two of us, our arms wrapped around each other; him committing to getting clean and apologizing for all his misdeeds; and myself, born anew, filled with confidence, serenity, and, inexplicably, newfound athletic prowess.

5. Chasing Drinks with Lies, and Lies with Drinks (Katie MacBride, April 2018, Longreads)

Before getting sober, Katie MacBride was a blackout drinker who told lies about drinking and, when holes were poked in her lies, doubled down on those lies. She writes about her period of reckoning that started after waking up on a hospital gurney with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of .4 (blackouts start at .2-.29 BAC), a box cutter and, in her words, “A suicide note I vaguely remembered writing on a Post-it just in case I ever needed it.”

MacBride’s story illustrates how the lies we tell ourselves only take us so far and then we have to start being honest with ourselves.

When there were no clues, I had no story — none of my own anyhow. My life belonged to witnesses, unwilling participants who might know the things that I did not. This is the scariest part of being a blackout drinker: not the inability to remember, the fear that someone else does. The worst thing you can do to a blackout drinker is tell them the truth.

6. The End Of Alcohol: One Writer On Going Sober (Billie JD Porter, April 2019, Elle)

Billie JD Porter writes about being an all-or-nothing kind of drinker since the age of 13 and growing up “relatively used to the idea of hitting the self-destruct button, and the fallout that went with it” as a result of having parents addicted to heroin. When her parents’ struggles with various substances became a mirror for her own alcohol dependency, Porter decided to take a year off drinking to discover the root of why she drinks.

By taking a break, to discover what that may be, I was strengthening my own foundations, so the past doesn’t grow into an even bigger, scarier monster that I’m unable to confront, like it has done for my parents.

At the time of my hiatus, I was only 23; I don’t think my days of cry-laughing into Tyskies and obnoxiously shouting my way through an evening into the early hours are behind me just yet, but I wanted to learn to be able to drink and have fun, in a manner that doesn’t see me descend into a downward spiral, taking me and everything I’ve worked so hard for, with it.

* * *

Alison Fishburn is a writer and recovering Floridian living in Ontario. She’s working on a memoir about the sudden death of her younger sister while learning to grieve. You can find her on Twitter @AlisonFishburn.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Not Homeless Enough for Assistance, But Still Without a Home

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

Working a stable job, paying rent on time, keeping a clean house ─ being a model tenant was not enough to keep a roof over Cokethia Goodman and her six children. When their Atlanta neighborhood became a hot market, their property’s owner decided to sell, and the family had to move. Their situation went downhill from there, taking them briefly to a Rodeway Inn paid for by the Red Cross, before struggling to secure homeless services.

For The New Republic, Brian Goldstone spent nearly a year reporting on the Goodman family’s struggle to live in Atlanta, and the larger phenomenon of working homelessness, where people without a residence still don’t qualify for certain essential types of assistance. This is a story about a lack of tenant protections, the human cost of so-called urban revitalization, rising rents and declining wages, and the tenuous positions of America’s working poor. As Goodman says, “I grew up in Atlanta. I graduated from high school in this city. Through my job, I’ve been taking care of people in this city. And now my kids and I are homeless? How does that even happen?”

Goodman’s predicament is increasingly common as the ranks of the working homeless multiply. The present support system, according to advocacy groups, effectively ignores scores of homeless families—excluding them from public discourse and locking them out of crucial support. This is due, in large part, to the way that HUD tallies and defines homelessness. Every January, in roughly 400 communities across the country, a battalion of volunteers, service providers, and government employees sets out to conduct the annual homeless census, referred to as the Point-in-Time count. Usually undertaken late at night and into the early morning, the HUD-overseen census is meant to provide a comprehensive snapshot of homelessness in America: its hot spots and demographics, its causes and magnitude. Last year, on the basis of this data, HUD reported a 23 percent decline in the number of families with children experiencing homelessness since 2007. The only problem, according to critics, is that HUD’s definition of “homeless,” and thus the scope of its Point-in-Time count, is severely limited, restricted to people living in shelters or on the streets. Everyone else—those crammed into apartments with others, or living in cars or hotels—is rendered doubly invisible: at once hidden from sight and disregarded by the official reporting metrics.

Julie Dworkin, the director of policy at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, has called attention to the profound consequences of this neglect. Not only are families denied housing assistance from HUD and its local partners, but, as the federal agency’s figures make their way into the media, the true scale and nature of the crisis is also obscured. In 2016, Dworkin and her colleagues began conducting their own survey of Chicago’s homeless population, expanding it beyond the HUD census to include families doubled up with others. Their total was twelve times that of the Point-in-Time count: 82,212 versus 6,786. “The idea that these families aren’t ‘actually’ homeless because they’re not in shelters is absurd,” Dworkin told me. “Oftentimes the shelters are full, or there simply are no family shelters—in which case, all these people are essentially abandoned by the system.” She noted the myth that families with children living in doubled-up arrangements are somehow less vulnerable than those in shelters, when these conditions can be just as detrimental to a child’s education, mental and physical health, and long-term development.

In Atlanta, where city leaders (and local headlines) have touted a drop in homelessness over the past four years, there has been no comparable effort to track the number of unhoused families who fall outside the official count. Data collected by other federal agencies does exist, however, and the chasm between their respective findings is similarly striking. The Department of Education defines as homeless anyone who lacks “a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence,” which explicitly encompasses those in motels and doubled up. During the 2016–2017 school year, the Department of Education reported 38,336 homeless children and youth enrolled in Georgia public schools; that same year, the state’s HUD-administered total, not just for children and youth but for the entire homeless population, was 3,716. Politicians cited the smaller number when shaping the public narrative about homelessness in the state; that figure also helps determine the amount of money allocated to homeless services the following year. Meanwhile, the parents of those 38,336 students are caught between two parallel definitions. At their child’s school, they are homeless. At Gateway, they are not.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Venus Williams. (Jordan Mansfield / Getty Images for LTA)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Elizabeth Weil, Neena Satija, Dan McDougall, Leslie Jamison, and Amos Barshad.

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Betting the Farm on the Drought

AP Photo/The Courier, Karl Anderson

Seamus McGraw | Betting the Farm on a Drought | University of Texas Press | April 2015 | 41 minutes (7,419 words)

 

The sun wasn’t even up yet when Ethan Cox tugged his work boots on, along with his old barn coat, the lighter one. He knew he wouldn’t need the heavier one. He didn’t even have to check the local forecast. It was going to be warm that day, low to mid-80s as the day wore on, he guessed, pretty much the same as it had been for quite a while. He glanced out the bedroom window at the sky. It was gray and brittle. It was going to be dry, too. That was no surprise either. The first week of March 2012 had been unusually dry. So had the whole month of February. In fact, the whole winter had been warm and dry. The yuppies and the liberals across the river in St. Louis or up in Chicago or out in San Francisco and New York all talked about that as being evidence that the climate was changing, that the bill was coming due for a century’s worth of pouring all manner of poison into the atmosphere.

Ethan’s neighbors thought that was kind of amusing. They saw the warm, dry weather as a godsend. After two years of record or near-record flooding, a deluge in 2011 so powerful that the Army Corps of Engineers decided to blow up the levees along the Mississippi River to keep Cairo, Illinois, from being washed off the map and such brutal rainstorms a year earlier that the region suffered $3 billion in losses and crop and infrastructure damage that forced many farmers in the region to the brink of bankruptcy, to them the unseasonably warm and dry spring of 2012 was a sign from above that the worst was over, at least for now.

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‘The Survivor’s Edit’: Bassey Ikpi on Memory, Truth, and Living with Bipolar II

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Naomi Elias | Longreads | August 2019 | 24 minutes (6,573 words)

 

Bassey Ikpi remembers the Challenger explosion; she can recall the exact moment it happened, in 1984. She can remember, in exquisitely painful detail, how she felt watching that tragic accident unfold on live television, in 1984. Yet Google and the history books tell us it happened in 1986. “What is truth,” Ikpi asks, “if it’s not the place where reality and memory meet?”

The blurry line between emotional truth and fact is stylishly captured in an optical illusion of a book cover (designed by Matthew McNerney) for Ikpi’s new memoir-in-essays, I’m Telling The Truth But I’m Lying. The Nigerian-American author takes up the project of remembering, with great dexterity and compassion for herself. Ikpi opens up about living with bipolar II; “Imagine you don’t fit anywhere,” Ikpi writes, “not even in your own head.” We experience her life pre- and post-diagnosis; her adolescence in Stillwater, Oklahoma; her early twenties touring as a spoken word artist with HBO’s Def Poetry Jam; her sleepless nights; and her hospitalization.The latter proves to be a turning point, one that finally gives her a name for her mental illness and — as the book demonstrates — a framework for understanding the story of her life.

The diagnosis is clarifying; it allows her to see how mental health impacts her relationships to her family and friends, and to herself, often determining what she feels and remembers, and how she remembers it. In this way Ikpi also uses her book to interrogate the nature of memory itself — how fragile it is, how it can be colored and recolored by trauma and guilt and self-preservational drive. “I learned how to take the truth and bend it like light through a prism,” Ikpi explains in the book, “I learned to lie beautifully.” Rather than present readers with a sanitized cluster of biographical data, Ikpi offers a memoir that places the reader inside her mind, conflict and all. Read more…

The Little Book That Lost Its Author

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Amber Caron | Boulevard | Spring 2019 | 16 minutes (3,262 words)

 

In Roald Dahl’s 1953 short story, “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” Adolph Knipe, the story’s protagonist, invents a computer that can provide the answer to a math problem in five seconds. His invention is a technical masterpiece, and his boss sends him on a weeklong vacation to celebrate his good work. Knipe, however, doesn’t travel and doesn’t even celebrate. Instead, he takes a bus back to his two-room apartment, pours himself a glass of whiskey, and sits down in front of his typewriter to reread the beginning of his most recent short story: “The night was dark and stormy, the wind whistled in the trees, the rain poured down like cats and dogs.” It’s not a promising beginning, and Knipe knows it. He feels defeated, nothing more than a failed writer, when he’s suddenly “struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: That English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!” His fate isn’t to write stories, he realizes, but to build a machine that can write stories for him. Read more…

Looking for Carolina Maria de Jesus

Illustration by Bex Glendining

Tarisai Ngangura | Longreads | August 2019 | 18 minutes (4,506 words)

Here in the favela, almost everyone has a difficult life to live. But I am the only one who writes of what suffering is. I do this for the good of the others.

 Carolina Maria de Jesus, Quarto de Despejo

* * *

In 1960, at the age of 46, Carolina Maria de Jesus published her first book, Quarto de Despejo: Diário de uma Favelada (Child of the Dark in English). It’s comprised of diary entries written on scraps of paper and assembled into a memoir about life in Canindé, a favela community in the Brazilian city of São Paulo. The book sold more than 10,000 copies in less than a week, was eventually translated into 16 languages, and distributed in 46 countries, making Carolina Maria one of Brazil’s most widely read authors. And for a while, the most famous person in the country. 

Starting in the late 1800s, the very first favelas, known as bairros-africanos, were inhabited by formerly enslaved people. Today, the country’s Institute of Geography and Statistics calls them “sub-normal clusters.” Favelas lack basic sanitation, electricity, and health facilities and are located primarily in city centers. After Quarto de Despejo’s instant success, Carolina Maria became a fleeting cause célèbre for the rights of favelados.

Carolina Maria de Jesus was born in the state of Minas Gerais, about 500 miles north of Rio de Janeiro, and came into the world some time between 1914 and 1921. Like many Afro-Brazilians born during this time, she didn’t have a birth certificate. She grew up with her mother, grandfather, younger brother, and later her stepfather in the town of Sacramento, where most homes were small and functional, to guard from rain and sun. Her father was a street performer who abandoned the family soon after Carolina Maria was born. Her mother cleaned houses and washed clothes for white families who lived on farms bordering the city. She died when Carolina Maria was in her early twenties.

After her mother’s death, Carolina Maria moved around trying to find her footing before settling in metropolitan São Paulo. She also made a living cleaning homes for wealthy white Brazilians, but after becoming pregnant, she was barred from the house she worked at and forced to move to a favela. She chose the neighborhood of Canindé for its proximity to a junkyard, where she sold bags of collected paper and scrap iron for pennies. Black people who were lighter skinned were referred to as morenas and morenos and had a greater measure of respect and access to more jobs, better restaurants, libraries, and social mobility. Carolina Maria, a dark-skinned black woman, was an outsider in more ways than one.

After the surprise success of Quarto de Despejo, she traveled across Brazil’s states, signing books and giving public talks on the dire conditions of favelas. The press called her a rags-to-riches heroine: the one who had been born surrounded by garbage and yet became a writer. Carolina Maria became a reluctant (and ultimately unwilling) spokesperson for “bootstrap success” — her image vaunted to encourage others to let nothing keep them from their dreams. Not crippling debt or inaccessible education. Definitely not hunger, and most importantly, not racism. In the years after Carolina Maria’s debut, nine more books followed; six were published after her death in 1977. But the renown that came from her first frank writings on poverty wouldn’t be repeated.  


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In the afterlife of the global slave trade and colonialism, black history is a study of spaces, silences, question marks, and asterisks. Growing up in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s, I learned of colonialism as if it had been a momentary blip in my country’s history, not a profound interrupting occurrence whose effects would forever shape how I moved and saw the world. When I left home for university in Toronto, I learned of Canada’s history as a celebrated haven for runaway slaves, but did not hear of Africville, a historically black community in Nova Scotia destroyed by provincial and federal negligence. I noticed the same kind of erasure when I arrived in Brazil’s city of Salvador, the capital of Bahia state, which I’d chosen to make my home base as I started my career in freelance journalism in 2016.

Of the nearly 5 million Africans brought to the country during the transatlantic slave trade (10 times more than brought to North America), the first landed in Salvador, one of the oldest slave ports in the Americas. It’s where the Malê revolt erupted, which Brazilian historian João José Reis called “the most significant slave revolt in Brazil.” Brazil has more African descendants than any other country in the world except Nigeria — almost 51 percent of the nation’s population is black or mixed race. On a national scale, Salvador is the state capital with the highest number of Afro-Brazilians, with more than 80 percent of its people identifying as black or brown. The cadence and speech of Soteropolitanos (residents of Salvador) is audibly tinged with Bantu vocal patterns, and the moda (fashion) would not be out of place in pattern-rich Senegal. Local food is stamped with unmistakable West African flavors and beloved street snacks include acarajé, a deep-fried black bean bun that is also found in Nigeria and Ghana. Dende oil, an extract from the fruit of oil palms that leaves distinct orange marks on clothing, is an integral part of every meal and was also brought over from Africa’s West. 

Carolina Maria, a dark-skinned black woman, was an outsider in more ways than one.

In the months following my arrival, I searched for writers to guide me through Brazil. Yet the authors I discovered online and on bookshelves did not reflect the faces I saw around me. When I refined my search, specifically noting ‘Afro-Brazilian’ in my digital prompt, I learned about Maria Firmina dos Reis, a prominent abolitionist and teacher; Abdias Do Nascimento, the pan-Africanist, playwright, and founder of Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN); and Alzira Rufino, an activist and the first Afro-Brazilian woman to create a support service for female survivors of domestic violence. These writers exposed truths about their country’s treatment of black people, countering the myth of Brazil’s diverse, racial democracy. I also found Carolina Maria de Jesus, whose story was not only compelling, but was also to some degree a reflection of my own. I saw familiar breaks and patterns in her thoughts, dreams, doubts, and disappointments. 

Haunted by questions centuries older than her years, Carolina Maria constantly found equilibrium to be out of reach, even when it seemed as though she had finally achieved what she longed for. She landed at a crossroads so common to the “successful” black creative: a rapid abundance of opportunities contingent on total acquiescence, or nothing at all. She achieved renown for a season, then fell into obscurity and back, further still, into near poverty.  

It’s been more than 40 years since her death, and I wonder if anything has truly changed for black women anywhere who long for their art to be what takes care of them.

* * *

In 1962, The New York Times Book Review called Quarto de Despejo “a rarely matched essay on the meaning and feeling of hunger, degradation and want.” Carolina Maria’s debut pulled no punches and displayed no illusions about life in the favela. There was no long-suffering acceptance of martyrdom because a better life lay above. She’d hated where she lived, and even more so she hated those who allowed such places to exist. Quarto de Despejo literally translates to “room of garbage.” She wrote about culpability — whose fault was it that some people had to live among the garbage? Sometimes she blamed the people themselves, who, according to her, were lazy, drunk, vulgar, and illiterate. “I know very well there are contemptible people here, persons with perverted souls,” she wrote. This earned her no love from progressives, who found her sentiments self-righteous and demeaning to the poor. When she didn’t find fault with those around her, she chalked it up to sheer bad luck: “Is there no end to this bitterness of life? I think that when I was born I was marked by fate to go hungry.” More often, her mind would circle back to one answer — politicians. “When a politician tells us in his speeches that he is on the side of the people, that he is only in politics in order to improve our living conditions, he is well aware that touching on these grave problems, he will win at the polls,” she wrote. “Afterwards he divorces himself from the people. He looks at them with half-closed eyes, and with a pride that hurts us.” This was an entry she wrote on May 20th, 1955, a day she found herself particularly hungry and contemplating her place in a world where she was an “object banished to the garbage dump.”

 The 1950s were, on the surface, an auspicious time for Brazil. Under the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira (like Carolina Maria, a mineiro, born in the state of Minas Gerais), the country’s economic and political stability grew. Edson Arantes do Nascimento, soon to be known as Pelé, became an international soccer star. Bossa nova was born and on its way to becoming one of the country’s most distinctive musical innovations, with Johnny Alf’s “Eu e a Brisa” drifting in and out of bars across the country. For Carolina Maria, none of this mattered. The police regularly intimidated, arrested, and detained favela dwellers. Corruption was rampant at social services, and social elevation was only possible if she married a white man and had lighter-skinned children. All this she wrote in her diaries, sharing her confusion, disgust, and anger. In her eyes, to be poor and hungry was an undeserved burden for anyone, and it was a national shame she cast a glaring light on.

* * *

Carolina Maria had three children, and her only daughter, Vera Eunice Lima de Jesus, born in 1953, is the writer’s closest living relative. As the public face of her mother’s literary works, Vera Eunice speaks at roundtable discussions where the work is featured, but she doesn’t own the rights to any of it. 

Vera Eunice also accommodates writers like me, who come to her for answers about her mother’s life of contrasts. It’s been more than half a century since she lived in Canindé, and while some memories elude her, others she recalls as though they happened yesterday. She told me she’d barely turned 7 when fame came knocking at their barraco. Made of pieces of discarded timber and asbestos, it was stuffed with bits of plastic and paper to act as both insulation and ventilation. Carolina Maria had built it herself. During the summer months, it was unbearably hot inside the cramped home, with the asbestos emitting heat all day. São Paulo is also known for its torrential rainfall, so when it poured the roof would leak, drenching their two mattresses. In that small shack Vera Eunice lived a life stifled by scarcity. “We would eat once a day. My oldest brother was a teenager and he was always hungry,” she said. 

These writers exposed truths about their country’s treatment of black people, countering the myth of Brazil’s diverse, racial democracy.

Like her mother’s writing style, Vera Eunice spoke to me in a direct, almost dry way — her voice strong and measured. “One day, my mother and I went out to look for food. We were passing this house and a white woman came running out and said she had a gift for us. My mother was so happy because we had not been able to find anything,” she said. “The gift was wrapped in newspapers so we rushed home and my mother quickly tore it open to see what it was. It was a pile of rats.” Carolina Maria had recounted this particular interaction in her diaries; it was a moment that scarred both mother and daughter. For the writer, particularly, this interaction showed that to outsiders she didn’t simply live amidst garbage, she too was disposable.

Audálio Dantas, a young journalist working for the newspaper Diário da Noite, spent a week in Canindé in 1958. He was researching life in the favela for what he hoped would be a story on the recently built playground donated by a politician soliciting votes from the poor. As the legend goes, he came across Carolina Maria threatening to put some neighbors in her diaries if they didn’t stop mistreating a group of children who were having fun on the swings. Intrigued, Dantas asked to see some of her work. He took a couple of her entries to his editor, and soon after, excerpts were published in the paper to great fanfare. Dantas later became bureau chief of O Cruzeiro, the leading weekly magazine from Rio de Janeiro. Although the newspaper exposure led to a book deal for Carolina Maria, it also attracted a barrage of harassment and a backlash that was unceasing.  

After the book came out, rumors began to circulate of Carolina Maria’s difficult disposition. Her politics during the book’s press tour failed to garner any favor when listeners realized that what she had written about sexism, political corruption, and poverty was not mournful musings, but rather her true convictions. She found it necessary to call out racial prejudice and in a country whose social stability and national identity was built on the idea of colorblindness through race mixing, her words were seen as not only inflammatory, but also blatantly false. When the novelty of a published black favelada wore off, the press coverage grew harsh; critics from well-known papers resorted to tabloid-like spitefulness. A writer from the paper O Globo called her “uncouth.” A literary critic from the largest newspaper in the country, Folha de São Paulo, found her work after Quarto De Despejo to be “pastiche,” and a later article would run in that same paper with the headline, “Carolina: Victim or Crazy?”

In the publishing industry, some writers are allowed to be all the messy parts of themselves, even when their behaviors and beliefs border on violent. The perceived strength of their work assures them a mythical cachet that leaves them faultless. This free pass was not given to Carolina Maria. She was not allowed to be mercurial and received little empathy. Some literary critics and political pundits questioned her competence, and she was forced to prove her legitimacy for the duration of her career. Those who want to protect her legacy face a similar interrogation. “Look, my mother wrote everything herself. We slept in the same bed and every night I would hear her get up to write,” Vera Eunice told me. “If we had no lights she would use candles and continue writing.” In 2012, Audálio Dantas talked about the events leading up to the publication of the first entries, which became the book Quarto de Despejo. “I had not written a single line. The story was in those books,” he said.

When her first press tour came to an end, Carolina Maria wanted to step away from diaries, to write novels, poetry, and to be taken seriously as an author. Her publishers, however, wanted her to keep doing what had amazed before. She refused, and for a while, she stuck to her guns, because for the first time she had the privilege to say no. Money had come in, and four months after Quarto de Despejo debuted, Carolina Maria and her children were able to leave the favela for the middle-class neighborhood of Santana, a 30-minute train ride from Canindé. 

* * *

To support Quarto de Despejo, Carolina Maria traveled so often and so extensively that airport workers would hug her at the arrival terminal. “Every day cards come from international editors who want to translate the book. Even I am astonished at the impact,” she wrote. She was happy, almost forcefully so. The kind of joy that’s laced with fear and doubt but is also desperately hopeful.

After settling down in Santana, Carolina Maria set about creating a haven for herself and her small family. In Canindé they’d lived without electricity, relying on candles when she could afford to buy them. In her new home, she put in 14 light fixtures. She bought shoes for Vera Eunice, who had always hated walking barefoot, and her two boys, João José and José Carlos stopped acting out. “I used to think João was rude. But now that we have food in the house he has transformed,” she wrote in Casa de Alvenaria, her second book, also a diary published just under a year after the release of Quarto de Despejo. “He has left rude João to be nice João. Hunger really makes people neurótico.” Memory of life prior to the book was still very clear and so too was the relief and gratitude for her new beginnings. As in Canindé, she still woke up before the sun, but now there was no hand-wringing as she worried about what she would feed her children. In Santana, when João José, José Carlos, and Vera Eunice woke up, they had breakfast with bread and their tea with milk and sugar. Once the children left for school, she would begin preparations for lunch, then dinner. She didn’t have to beg from people’s homes anymore or dig through the garbage, fearful of eating something dosed with poison by store owners attempting to dissuade favelados from searching for food. Carolina Maria could now go out to the butcher and choose any cut of meat that she wanted. She bought fresh fruit and vegetables from the market. “My life is now velvet. Now I have food. I have a house. I have things to wear,” she wrote. 

When the novelty of a published black favelada wore off, the press coverage grew harsh; critics from well-known papers resorted to tabloid-like spitefulness.

Carolina Maria could have chosen to write only the good things that came her way when she left the favela, but in Casa de Alvenaria, she wrote about her new life as bluntly as she had about her old one. She saw just how inflexible the middle-class reality was to her presence. The white maid she had hired constantly made it known that she believed their roles should be reversed, and Carolina Maria made note of her complaints: “My God in the sky. This is the end of the world. God is punishing me. The world has capsized. I, a white person, have a black boss.” Her new neighbors treated her with contempt and saw her presence as an eyesore. “I am sad and not content because when something happens here, everyone always blames my children,” she wrote. Outside of her problems at home, she also had trouble opening a bank account because she didn’t have the proper ID. She opened a joint account with Dantas, who was now not only her editor but also her agent. She had money, but anti-blackness does not dissolve with improved social status. It stings differently, but is noticeable all the same. 

While many critics saw Casa de Alvenaria as the inconsequential ramblings of someone with no direction, it was here I saw Carolina Maria most clearly. She was painfully aware of what both the press and her peers thought and said about her, so she attempted to tread the tightrope carefully. She knew people were watching and wilfully betting on her failure, so she wanted to write without risking the welfare of her children. “I am not crazy about this idea of writing my diary based off my actual life now. I am writing against the rich. They are powerful and they can destroy me,” she agonized. 

Her first book had kicked up the reactionary dust of white guilt, and she tried to settle what her words had stirred up, while making it known that her success did not end social inequality. Carolina Maria had written her second book while caring for her three children, showing up to book signings, pleasing her agent and publisher, and trying to maintain her own sense of self. She was exhausted. “Due to the success of my book I am now regarded as a bill of exchange. A representation of profit. A gold mine,” she wrote in Casa de Alvenaria. The freedom money should have purchased now felt like a cruel joke, and her feelings of despair culminated in one of the saddest thoughts present in her known works: “Looking at the sky, if I had wings I would lift my children up there, one at a time, and never again return to the earth.” She had few friends and those who came to see her would ask for money, which she usually gave. Carolina Maria had done what we’ve all been told needs to be done to be a good citizen, to be happy and fulfilled, far away from hardship: She had worked hard. And now here she was, uncomfortable in her own brick house. 

* * *

Carolina Maria de Jesus passed away in 1977 in Parelheiros, three hours from Santana and Canindé. She had moved there almost a decade earlier, after she could no longer afford to live in Santana. It was a poor, rural neighborhood on the periphery of São Paulo, known for its heavy pollution. She died from respiratory complications, exacerbated by the industrial waste sites surrounding her home.

When memorializing her life, the writer of her obituary in Jornal do Brasil called her vassoura de papel — a paper scavenger. This was in reference to her work collecting scrap paper and iron, which she’d had to start again after she moved. She’d kept writing and financed the three books published before her death with the royalties from her first book. But she died poor. Not like how she started, but not how she should have been. Carolina Maria had signed a financially crippling contract and she saw very little of the money received from the international licensing of her books. 

‘Looking at the sky, if I had wings I would lift my children up there, one at a time, and never again return to the earth.’

For Tom Farias, author of Carolina: Uma Biografia, a book on the writer released in 2017, Carolina Maria deserves to be highlighted in the same Brazilian canon as Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector, and Paulo Coelho. “She was more than just her diaries, she wrote plays, songs, and poetry. She was an artist,” he said.

Since her death, she has been often acknowledged during Novembro Negro — Brazil’s Black History Month, when the achievements of living and dead Afro-Brazilian leaders are brought center stage. But on a day-to-day basis, it’s mostly other black women who have kept her memory alive. In Salvador, Denise Ribeiro taught a popular class at Universidade do Estado Da Bahia (UNEB) on the social relevance of Quarto de Despejo in 2008. A health and nutrition professor and former coordinator for the Municipal Health Secretariat of Salvador, she’s spent more than three decades studying health from a myriad of perspectives, with a focus on black feminism, traditional communities, and African spirituality. In her home, the names of well-known Afro-Brazilian women authors lined the spines of her library: Fatima Oliveira, Djamila Ribeiro, and Conceição Evaristo, alongside other voices from the diaspora such as Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Carolina Maria was a fitting addition among the company of black women whose work forced the world to center blackness, even when it seemed inconceivable. “Carolina Maria had such a hard life and so much happened to her in that time,” Ribeiro told me. “Because I teach health, her book was so relevant to the things that affect the way black people live, and the reality is that her life is the life of so many people today. Nothing has changed at all.” 

Not that long ago, in March 2018, Marielle Franco, a queer Afro-Brazilian city councillor from Rio de Janeiro, was assassinated in her car just hours after speaking at an event for black women’s empowerment. Franco was born in Complexo da Maré, a Rio neighborhood made up of 16 favelas. It’s considered one of the largest communities in the city with almost 150,000 residents. In 2017 and 2018, more than 40 young people, the majority of them black and under 24, were killed during police raids in Maré, which happen frequently. In May of this year, eight people were left dead after another police operation in the area, which forced children to search for cover so they wouldn’t be struck by bullets. Access to electricity remains a problem with many using what’s locally known as gato, or cat. This device, made up of manually inserted wires, is attached to city electrical supplies and it diverts energy toward the overlooked favelas. Six years ago, the monetary amount of the diverted electricity came to $500 million in U.S. dollars. Prone to explosions, gatos are dangerous creations, but for many families, it is too expensive to get onto the formal electrical grid. Carolina Maria faced the same dilemma while living in Canindé during the 1950s.

* * *

Stories of black women creators whose work shook the world but who died underappreciated never cease to raise in me a familiar madness and a self-contained rage. It’s a hollow pain and a fear that hovers over my own hopes and dreams. But there is also a separate, wild appreciation for the existence of things deemed impossible. It is utter madness that Carolina Maria was able to write books at all, and it is madness that she made it enough for a girl from Zimbabwe to one day discover her work and see herself. In Carolina Maria’s writings, I saw a life that was lived even when living felt more like fighting.

During my last conversation with Vera Eunice she asked me to help her petition for a Carolina Maria de Jesus archive in the southern city of Curitiba. She also wanted my help collecting original print photographs of her mother because she has none. Most are in the hands of Dantas’s grandchildren. “Dantas took a lot of pictures of my mother,” she said. “Before he died we had been negotiating about his giving them to me, and now it’s even harder.” When I reached out to the Dantas estate to ask about the photographs of Carolina Maria, his executor did not offer a response.

In one of the most recognizable shots I found of Carolina Maria online, she is looking directly at the camera, head slightly tilted to the side. Her black skin, deep and smooth, her hair under a loosely tied headwrap. She spent most of her life unseen, living in shadows, and even when the light came, it didn’t brighten as much it blinded. She was the mirror, and what she reflected about her world was so startling it took time to properly process what she had released. When the noise died down, her unexpected work became an appalling reminder of a reality many would have rather just forgotten. In this picture, it’s as if she knew that she would not have many opportunities to really be seen, so she made it count. She looks determined, a little sad, a little proud. She was still, and for a moment she forced us to be still. Without anyone expecting it, a woman from the favela wrote a book that read an entire nation.

 

* * *

Tarisai Ngangura is a journalist and photographer. She documents black lives around the globe — their histories, legacies and movements. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Jezebel, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, New York Magazine, Hazlitt, VICE and Catapult.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Fact checker: Samantha Schuyler

Greenland’s Deepening Ecological Grief

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With glacial ice retreating and formerly reliable sea ice becoming more and more treacherous for winter hunting and social trips, the people of Greenland understand climate change first hand. As Dan McDougall reports for The Guardian, a study of 2% of Greenland’s population by the University of Copenhagen and the Kraks Fond Institute for Urban Economic Research reveals that Greenlanders are experiencing greater anxiety and a special sort of ecological grief as direct results of climate change eroding their traditional ways of life.

“There is no question Arctic people are now showing symptoms of anxiety, ‘ecological grief’ and even post-traumatic stress related to the effects of climate change. The impact of climate change on mental health is a looming public health crisis. So if a Greenland-wide survey points to anxieties around food security and way of life it’s another red line between climate change and mental health,” says Howard. “We are searching for terms to capture this deep feeling of pain in Arctic nations – words like eco-anxiety or ecological grief – but for me, something called ‘solastalgia’ perfectly sums up how people living on the frontline of climate change feel. It was coined by the Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht. It is also related to an Inuit word that refers to a friend behaving in an unfamiliar way. It means feeling homesick when you are home. Many of these islanders are in mourning for a disappearing way of life.”

In Ilulissat, Claus Rassmussen is stirring a foul brew of oily blood and fish. “Seal stew,” the sled-dog hunter says. Strung out in a row, his family carry buckets of the murky soup to feed to the dogs – a nightly ritual for Rassmussen and his five daughters.

Over the past two decades, Greenland’s sled dog population has halved to around 15,000 with the numbers still falling. Greenland’s unique sled dog culture and the specialised training technology and knowledge is in danger of disappearing.

An interview with Rassmussen proves more emotional than anticipated. In his modest home, an old wooden cottage among social housing blocks, his face is contorted. Instead of the Greenlandic way – long silences and monosyllabic answers – there comes an outpouring.

There are six of us crouched in the room, including three of his daughters, as he talks about the decision to kill his beloved dogs because he could no longer afford to feed them. As he talks about shooting one, a dog given the name “my son” in the local language, the teenagers burst into tears – a shocking explosion of grief in a culture where emotion is rarely shown. In Inuit culture, strength, silence, and self-sufficiency are admired traits.

“I had a blood clot last year and couldn’t hunt,” says Rassmussen. “Here in Ilulissat we have the ice fjord and, for now, it’s strong enough to hold us, but I was unable to walk for nine months. The trouble was nobody wanted my dogs so I had to kill eight of 13.

“I killed my favourites. To spare them possible cruelty. That was my decision. The others were given away to people I knew. They weren’t dog people, but were interested in having animals – but perhaps they weren’t looked after in the way they should’ve been. I managed to take some back and since then I have been building up a new dog team.”

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Flagrant Foul: Benching Teen Moms Before Title IX

Illustration by J.O. Applegate

Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | August 2019 | 27 minutes (6,922 words)

Before the pregnancy, before the ineligibility, and before the lawsuit, Jane Christoffer was one of the best basketball players in the basketball-loving state of Iowa. As a freshman in 1968–69 at Ruthven Consolidated High School, a school of just 106 students located in northwest Iowa, the 5-foot-11 Christoffer averaged 35 points per game, leading Ruthven to the state tournament for the first time in more than a decade. She upped her scoring average the next season to 47 points, and was named third team all-state, which prompted Richard Barber, her coach at Ruthven, to say, “Jane’s as good a player as we’ve had in the 20 years I’ve been here.” Read more…