The Invisible City
The place I’m writing you from is the basement apartment of a row house my grandma, a native New Orleanian, purchased during the crack epidemic in the in late 80s in Washington DC. At that time the neighborhood was not far from open air drug markets where people commuted from miles around to and was ravaged completely by addiction at every blighted corner.
The population I live as a part of as a Black resident of the capital of the country is curious, because the national imagination maintains an image of the entire town that centers the federal government and imagines the city to be composed of politicians and white politicos whose concerns are those of the federal government. Actually those people are a minority who take deliberate measures to suppress the autonomy of the majority of the city. The reality is that Washington DC has had an overwhelmingly Black working class population the majority of the 20th century and still maintains a Black plurality despite aggressive and violent gentrification. Black Washington DC is an invisible city to nod to Calvino’s novel’s title, because it does not exist nationally. We are invisible in the picture the country has of the place we live. We have a crime bill that just passed that brings some of the most draconian overpolicing to this city that is already by a number of metrics including number of officers per capita and number of independent police departments the most policed in the nation. You’ll never hear of the numerous Black people murdered by police in DC in national news, because this is not the story national news wishes to be told of DC. Now we’ll continue being crushed with the full force that comes from surrounding the core of the empire, and no one will hear our cries. But maybe you will reading this which is why I write.
I like a novel of a city. Last year I completed a new novel that remains unpublished that is a novel of Black crack era Washington DC, my debut novel was in worshipful homage to the City of New Orleans, and on a fellowship I centered a novel in the Moroccan city of Fes with the city figuring as its own specter of character. All novels don’t use cities in this way but there is something I like about the novel that uses the identity of a city as large element to what’s being done with the work. So I’ve been happy continuing my project of staying immersed in a novel by a writer of the African continent at all times by pacing my way through the short chapters of Pulitzer winner Hisham Matar’s most recent novel MY FRIENDS as it explores London through the eyes of Libyans in exile there.
Before I leave you for now, because I am a person who owes a great deal to New Orleans, I wanted to use this space to honor in a small way the life of a young Palestinian American, Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, who grew up in the New Orleans area and was killed in the West Bank of Palestine recently as the apartheid regime has brought its aims to ethnically cleanse Palestinians to a catastrophic head fueled by our taxes over the past few months. I also wanted to share the story of Palestinian New Orleans resident Samaher Esmail who was arrested for the crime of posting on social media by the occupation forces in Ramallah.
For me these are times to be alert and aware and to be action oriented. These are serious times that require much of us. We’ve been living under surreal conditions since the dawn of the pandemic for years now so we need to be used to the fact that this is our reality. Also totalitarianism is here, now, in America. So we live awakened to ourselves as struggling people who struggle with others to survive as we must these days. We must recover and rest but know when we’ve been restored and it’s time to take ourselves up again too.