No Room for Shakespeare

If you looked at us, you would have to make sure that you looked twice. That would have to be the rule with us. There is so much that you could miss with only one glance; one quick stare without any kind of follow up. And you would regret this.

That sounds like a threat, doesn’t it? The truth is that we are easily missed when you do not focus on the details and, instead, worry about the large picture. How often do you see people like us on the news (my family and friends)? I can’t remember one moment in my life when we were represented well in any sort of media (television, newspapers, film, etc). All the stories heard covered the old extremes between failure and uncontrollable violence. But there was more than this in our lives.

I will start with the neighborhood. We were there once… That neighborhood… We were in those apartments in the part of town that the city tried to forget about when the residents they could recognize and relate to moved out. Oh, wait. I said “we”… No, it was not “we.” It was them, maybe, meaning my family, the larger community, and any of the other arrivals who took up entire floors of those buildings. But it was not really my family yet. That was to come a few years later, after they discovered that they could live there and survive among themselves. There are many stories to come before my own entrance.

My mother, between cooking and keeping the place as clean as it could be, would always mention her first week in this country as a real and very vivid nightmare. She stayed with an aunt and uncle – not really an aunt and uncle, but close enough for me to care – and there was a very powerful snowstorm. They were kind enough to pick her up at the airport and provide her with a thick winter coat to wrap around the two sweaters and jacket she had put on after the plane landed. They took her one suitcase, drove for over an hour in the blowing and windy snow (something she had never seen before; only read about in school readers shared with other students) and brought her to their apartment. The power had been out for almost thirty minutes while the storm whipped at the screened windows and empty balcony. Whenever I asked about this, she told me, Yes, she did want to leave, but also knew that she wanted more for her children than they could have in her old home. That was the other idea never mentioned: there was nothing to go back to except her own family, a lack of opportunities and a regret that would grow and haunt her mind forever. She had to stay.

I still wonder about my father. Did he really have to stay in a cold and often difficult place to raise a family? Did he belong anywhere except the place he knew with the people he grew up with in his own land? I wonder about this even now. He did not raise me very much; only kept a firm hand in my life. Yes, I am old enough to remember when it was easy to beat a child and not have the media or neighborhood gossips involved in the act. My mother was not innocent of this, nor did she stay away from physical punishment when handling me. There were slaps and wooden spoons – and other utensils and objects – used when she caught me acting up. My father was also interested in variety with his weapons. A leather belt (buckle or tongue); a steak I had tried to throw away without finishing the meat down to the raw bone; his heavy fist in my chest and back (never in the face): those were his instruments. He would also shake me both physically and psychologically deaden me with other ideas about who I was and what I would become later in the life he always mentioned giving me. No, I will not mention much more about him here. Enough about this…

There is also my brother: adopted, attacked and loved when necessary. He had been told at school that he would never graduate, would never be anything more than a janitor cleaning out garbage cans for the very people who were telling him such things. My mother would also be told such things, which meant that she would respond for him. It was very hard to know what my brother was thinking and I was too young to really understand what all of this meant. We also went to different schools and he would often be late getting home from his classes. When asked, he told my mother it was because he had been fighting. The key thing is that he was outnumbered and still managed to make the bullies that harassed him hurt. Again, I was too young to help; too far away to know the complete truth about how he was being treated at school and in the outer community until I was older and had to undergo something similar to these humiliations and conflicts. If anyone ever asks me for a hero, I choose my mother and brother. They are the two people that I learned the most from as a child. My mother taught me that there is a certain grace in humility and that appearances do matter. My brother made it clear to me that there were many ways to fight back, and they were not all physical and damaging. My arena was the classroom and my battle scars came from the grades I received in classes with kids who did not want to know me as someone so educated he was rumoured to have actually read the dictionary (only partly true – I would often glance at the bifurcated Funk and Wagnalls in our collection). I avoided them when I could; I never gave in to their hate and abuse.

As I said, I came later. There are so many stories I have to tell about our lives in those small rooms and the limits to our vision of what we could be in an unfriendly place. We kept together and rarely tried to mix with the ones who had their own ideas about what we were and how we should be treated. Once any of us gained a little success in this world, the idea of remaining physically close was finished. People began to move into private homes, raised families far enough away that cars had to be used to visit friends (another material sign of success that was accepted without anyone sensing the irony of this new situation) and decided that they knew each other well enough to be out of those other lives. You could no longer just run to a relative’s home if there was a problem or a need for shelter. Escape meant using the larger roads in the unfinished and rising new sections of the town. A car or a bus was fine if it was available. Otherwise, problems remained behind closed doors, or became gossip over the distance of a telephone line. Everyone became private and known more to themselves than to others. They were hidden from the community’s appraising eyes.

So, there was distance, an unfriendly place that learned to leave us alone when we became people who earned enough money to buy homes and influence votes, and random moments of violence in my childhood. This seems like enough to create the idea of a writer, or at least an artist.

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You can find more poems, stories, and articles by Kendall Defoe on my Vocal profile. I complain, argue, provoke and create...just like everybody else.

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