Were not machines you know

Tonight I went to a fantastic reading astutely curated by Syracuse University's Krista Kennedy (in my friend Sparky's restaurant on Burnett Avenue). Another friend Janine DeBaise was reading from her wonderful upcoming memoir Snake Dreams, which explores her connection to the landscape of upstate New York. She was in great company with the well-known poet Minnie Bruce Pratt who read from her new collection of poems entitled Inside the Money Machine. Both were joined by Steve Himmer who read from his new novel The Bee-Loud Glad, about a decorative hermit. Each of these works ignited thought, evoked emotion in their interconnected theme of land and labor.

Minnie Bruce's opening lines "We're not machines, you know" in her poem All That Work That No One Knows moved me in remembering my mother's invisible labor as she worked for fifteen years as a custodian in a hospital. I remember watching her disappear in the darkness of a dawn yet undefined; her body swallowed by fog and Brussels' constant variations on rain. I grew up watching my mother rid the messes in other people's lives; she was the woman who cleaned the blood and the vomit of the sick. This witnessing shaped me. Watching the invisibility of my mother, hearing her tell me about the pain in her back, in her wrists from pushing the massive polishing machine across the shiny floors of the hospital has given me a specific lens of truth.

I remember knowing early on that my mother's life, the labor her body produced was something our world consumed without even noticing. I remember thinking there was nothing more precious than my mother, and yet nothing cheaper than her life.

This reading came at the back end of watching the movie Biutiful which affected me deeply. Oscar-nominated Javier Bardem's performance in this exploration of mortality, of the value of a life, against the backdrop of our global economy was rattling, to say the least. Bardem's character is dying from cancer and tries to make peace with the biutiful world which he is about the leave. Of course, the fact that I am a 'cancer survivor' as our society labels those of us who do not immediately succumb to the illness was all the more poignant. Having wrestled with my own mortality for the last two years has put my entire life into a sharp focus. All of this while looking for work for the last year...there is a line in Biutiful that says: "Never trust a man who is hungry." I have become that ‘man’. I am not yet hungry but I can taste the metallic tang of fear at the back of my throat as I look for work in a crumbling economy. I often wonder about the billions of unskilled laborers who are also seeking employment along with me. Here I am, with two graduate degrees, armed with the fluency in three languages, seven years teaching at the University level and a couple of finished manuscripts under my belt and I am wondering how I will pay my heat bill next winter. And yet, I fall in the world’s top 10% most privileged people, simply because I am not among those who are swimming across oceans to escape countries where there is no drinking water, or others still who are falling off barges on the river Congo to try to make a day's meal. I am not in their shoes. Not now, not anymore.

Pratt’s poetry tonight moved me back to those days when poverty ruled my every day life. And even though I am no longer that unskilled, powerless sixteen year old celebrating her birthday in the slums of Mexico City, the memories of those days syncopate my current search for work with a bitter-tasting fear.

We are living in a world where manual labor has reduced the price of a human life to that of a spoiling fruit at the back of a truck. We live in a reality like the one described in Biutiful where beauty is an approximation of itself, B I U T I F U L falling short of B E A U T I F U L. In the words of Minnie Bruce Pratt: "We are not machines, you know. There's only so much we can take, always more that we can, until we can't."