Mt. Washington, Los Angeles

Day 1

Packing. Planet Aid. Jewish Summer Camps.

The goal is to fit everything I own in the back of my Subaru and drive to Connecticut. The day has dissolved into a river of tasks. To put in boxes. To lean heavy box against pelvis and carry down buoyant wood stairs to car. To go to bank. To Western Union deposit to Uganda. To drop off two bags of clothes to GoodWill.

They are mom's clothes. I took them home from CT, where they hang familiarly in my closet. I don't wear them. I put them in white plastic bags and load them in the car. I have googled a local goodwill. Only when I drive there, I find a boarded up building. 20 minutes from the day of tasks. I have to race home to sell my book shelf. On my way, I pass a yellow bin with "Planet Aid" painted on. Thank goodness. I pull over the car. I open the trunk, I pull out the garbage bags full of clothes. I dump them in the aid bin. I drive away. It is strange to me that I have just sent clothes to the "developing world" in a way that looked and felt like throwing away garbage.

I know that aid can be problematic. While it can meet immediate need, donated clothing also can take work away from local clothing makers and sustain a cycle of dependency. And, on a personal level, I wonder what small affect it has on the psyche to be wearing used clothing from another culture. Not even looking at the back narrative of colonization, but just the slight remove of purpose from function. I don't know.

I had this dream over the summer on the bus from Kigali to Uganda where, in the dream, so many people had died and their clothes were all being removed to give away and in the dream there was something sad about the break in continuity. That the people who inherit these clothes won't know anything about the lives that once filled them. The clothes are rendered impersonal. So, I suppose it is my own sadness that I attend to after throwing bags of my mother's clothes in the Planet Aid bin. My own sadness as I prepare to drive home.

This trip is prep for a project that I am doing in Uganda. A play that wrestles with foreign aid and the politics that keep us from seeing each other as human. By my partner in graduate crime, Uganda playwright Deborah Asiimwe.

Deborah asked me last year what does "nation" mean to you? I was trying to articulate why go to Uganda now - they have a presidential election coming up. It's contentious. The same man Museveni has been in power for 25 years. Political opposition grows. Tension between indigenous nation autonomy and state autonomy grows. Implications of corruption. Worries over whether the elections will be fair. I imply, well, democracy is at stake here. Can Uganda have a leadership turnover through the voting booth? Deborah bristles at the unspoken concern that Uganda will become another failed nation-state in Africa.

She writes:
What happens when over 40 nations (the ones popularly known as "tribes") are forced to merge into one "nation" under a system of governance that is unfamiliar? Can one really call that a nation? What happens to the smaller nations that find themselves under the mighty foot of the bigger nations? What does the word "nation" mean to you, Emily?

It's a good question.

Meanwhile, packing. Putting things in my car somehow seems to take all day. The whole of it. My neighbor walks by and voices his concern about leaving this car full of things on the street all night. He offers me to leave the car in his carport. We get to talking. He's a photographer. He tells me about an exhibit he's working on. Photographs of abandoned Jewish summer camps. He's interested in the sadness in these spaces - reminiscent of the impact of AIDS on the joy-of-life gay community in the 80s. And he says that the photographs often evoke, in a way he didn't intend, associations with Nazi concentration camps. He wonders, what does it mean that this one sad image - genocide - is layered into all other images of loss in the Jewish consciousness now?

Meanwhile, packing. My stuff doesn't fit in the car. I have one of those heroic epiphanies that climax coming of age movies, which in itself is not a big deal. That's just the rhythm of my thinking. I'm working on some serious geometry problems in the inside of my car and I remember this one box mom had in her room where she kept "valuable things". Travelers checks. A fancy rock. And the program for her play that I directed when I was in college. Why is this image in my mind now? And I thought, it's not the things that she cared for. It's me. And it's writing. The work of creating. How do you care for that?

Sometimes the only thing you can do is make space.

There's something I think that bears looking closer at... something about the work of creating continuity and the danger of symbols that make loss visible can also - you can mistake them for the living thing. Maybe it's a good thing for clothes to become impersonal. Maybe the personal is something... not so visible.