We the People.... Or what would it mean to have a democracy of histories?

We the People…
Or what would it mean to have a democracy of histories?

     This spring, I attended a Quaker meeting for the first time in my life. The first speaker — in that quiet and very beautiful room, filled by the almost midday light of a late May morning — said something like “it is harder to hear the word than to read it.” He said more than that, but those words stayed with me through the subsequent silence and speaking of the meeting, and indeed all the way to this moment of writing. Those words set off a meandering flow in my mind, something like: it is harder to hear the word than to read it; it is harder to feel the word than to hear it; it is harder to speak the word than to feel it; it is harder to express the word than to speak it; and so on. 
     The word was in that complex air we breathed together, those of us who can see seeing the complex light, those of us who can hear hearing the complex sounds, our skins sensing the shifts in temperature and humidity, our big brains sometimes judging, sometimes not.
     Or maybe he said, “it is easier to read the word than to hear the word,” and, at this remove, inclining the words differently changes my sense of space and direction, shadow and color, and meaning inflects differently, even peculiarly.

***

     Distant from that flow that felt both kind and dispassionate, an inquiring and squirreling encounter of word upon word, matter upon matter, life upon life, I watched a 20-minute video that had just won an Emmy. They’re eating dogs. The video was made and posted by a group whose Instagram handle is More Perfect Union. They’re eating the dogs! I remember that appalling claim made by Donald Trump and JD Vance about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio in the run-up to the 2024 election. The video presents without fanfare the destructive Trump-Vance lie. However, it does not shy away from showing the complexity of immigration, with its deep complex histories, and its local effects, also with their complex histories. This relatively short video shows histories expressed by real people: Haitians, Haitian-Americans, and other kinds of Americans. It traces micro-histories of needing and welcoming immigrants, and the entangled micro-histories of earlier inhabitants experiencing immigrants as weighing down a community that was already economically stricken. And the video exposes evidence of the Federal Government being unresponsive to need for more support for basic social infrastructure such as education and health care, as immigrants arrived, worked very hard for lower wages than the union wages earlier inhabitants were used to, jumpstarted Springfield’s severely declining economy, contributed to rapidly increasing rents, and attracted more immigrants.
     We discover that the cat whose disappearance was spun into “eaten” was found, alive and well, in the basement of its human’s house.
     Donald Trump won the city of Springfield by less than 150 votes.
     I watched this video three times to be able to summarize or report some of why I found it startlingly informative and challenging. It’s challenging because it is not polarized or polarizing. Don’t get me wrong. Trump’s and Vance’s “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats,” is unambiguously wrong and, to use a strong word, bad. And there is racism and European settler entitlement expressed. There are also expressions of loss, hope, despair, efforts to make their town better, failures of government, hard work, being left behind, and looking for new life. I wanted to choose a side and my heart and mind calmed when something confirmed “my” sense of “my” side, but in the end the effectiveness of the video — John Russell’s Deport Them All: Who’s to Blame for Springfield’s Immigrant Crisis? — is that it’s a story of people who have their different sides — shifting, caring, deluded, desperate, building, manipulated, deteriorating, younger (not necessarily chronologically), older (not necessarily chronologically), steadfast, sensible, these are just some of the adjectives that come to mind. There are many histories in this story; it’s a story of the United States, weaving many of its most important threads — migration to this continent, settlement, exploitation of workers, racism, internal migrations, industrialization, unionization, crazy profit-making by corporations, exploitation of workers, these threads reflected in — shaping and shaped by — US foreign policy, geopolitics, and the growth of more and much larger multinational-to-global companies. One major thread of US history does not appear in this video: the displacement and replacement of peoples who inhabited this land before an increasing flood of immigrants started in the late 16th century.

***

     The arc of that longer and larger history is visible in my neighborhood. In the three snapshots above this essay, you will see: an old-growth forest on this most congested island of Manhattan that was once inhabited only by the Lenape, a few descendants of whom now live amidst millions with genetic and cultural heritage from around the world, including me; a plaque on a rock that memorializes the “legendary” moment of shift from Manahatta to Manhattan in the language and from the perspective of people who felt they now owned New World Manhattan as their own, from their perspective land rightfully bought and occupied; and a notice presented in English and Spanish by Madison Square Park Conservancy in partnership with the Lenape Center. The notice starts with the opening words: Welcome to Lenapehoking. We are glad you all came. The welcome line is written in Lenape, English and Spanish. Below the welcome line is an account, from a Lenape perspective, of encounter, misunderstanding, disrespect, theft, loss, dispossession, displacement, and genocide, with genocide referring to the extinguishing of lives as well as communities and their cultures.
     The three photos express a large swath of the history I now live upon, that is now mine. My roots in India are deep within me and inform this “American” as she nows moves on this Lenape Island among millions of others with mixed heritage and many starkly different histories. Our histories are embedded in our bodies and shape our perspectives. These histories bring us to who we are in this present city, this young nation-state, and this very old land. I have been a resident of the United States almost throughout the period since 1980 until the present and became a citizen early in this century in large part because this was now my home and I felt connected to — shaped by and shaping — its many beautiful and challenging complexities, and also, now, accountable for the way this country or nation-state cares for people and land, land and people. In this era of “nation-states,” so recent and short in the history of human communities, residency and citizenship sometimes sound like abstract, bureaucratic things that allow for regulated (safe-enough?) economic activity and ownership of property, including extraction from the land, commodification of non-human nature, and exploitation of people. Yes, safe-enough economic activity and ownership of property can contribute to our wellbeing, but our wellbeing is so much more than just those; and this apart from the fact that “safe-enough” is almost always more, sometimes grievously very much more, for some people than for others. 
     Two very different people — their very different histories behind them! — give their sense of what participation in “economic activity” can mean beyond extraction, commodification, exploitation, and consumerism. Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes about strawberries:

     “In a way I was raised by strawberries, fields of them. Not to exclude the maples, hemlocks, white pines, goldenrod, asters, violets, and mosses of upstate New York, but it was the wild strawberries, beneath dewy leaves on an almost-summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it….
…
     You could smell ripe strawberries before you saw them, the fragrance mingling with the smell of sun on damp ground. It was the smell of June, the last day of school, when we were set free, and the Strawberry Moon, ode’mini-giizis. I’d lie on my stomach in my favorite patches, watching the berries grow sweeter and bigger under the leaves….
     Even now, after more than fifty Strawberry Moons, finding a patch of wild strawberries still touches me with a sensation of surprise, a feeling of unworthiness and gratitude for the generosity and kindness that comes with an unexpected gift all wrapped in red and green. “Really? For me? Oh, you shouldn’t have.” After fifty years they still raise the question of how to respond to their generosity. Sometimes it feels like a silly question with a very simple answer: eat them.” (From “The Gift of Strawberries” in Braiding Sweetgrass first published 2013)

     I feel somewhat the same tenderness and delicacy of engagement, unmediated by plastic or purchase, when I am shocked by a large and most-lovely sunflower, semi-wildly alive in a small, rough patch within my densely-populated and intensely overbuilt city. Really? For me? 
     Where do you feel this? And how do you try to notice and make more moments of such wellbeing possible for yourself and all other residents of this nation-state of ours, this generous land we inhabit?
     Quite differently, Vaclav Havel writes about the need for humans — well, he says man, but we won’t get distracted by that for the moment though the discursive narrowing of “human” happens widely and always has significant sociopolitical and ontological ramifications — to feel connected to and responsible for their work and its fruit or outcomes.

     “Therefore it’s not true that you should first think up an idea for a better world and only then “put it into practice,” but, rather, through the fact of your existence in the world, you create the idea or manifest it — create it, as it were, from the 'material of the world,' articulate it in the 'language of the world.' 
     … The most important thing is not to lose sight of personal relationships—i.e., the relationships between man and his co-workers, between subordinates and their superiors, between man and his work, between this work and its consequences, and so on.
      …
     It’s important that man have a home on this earth, not just a dwelling place; it’s important that his world have an order, a culture, a style; it’s important that the landscape be respected and cultivated with sensitivity, even at the expense of growth in productivity; it’s important that the secret inventiveness of nature, its infinite variety, the inscrutable complexity of its interconnections, be honored; it’s important that cities and streets have their own face, their own atmosphere, their own style; it’s important that human life not be reduced to stereotypes of production and consumption, but that it be open to all possibilities; it’s important that people not be a herd, manipulated and standardized by the choice of consumer goods and consumer television culture, whether this culture is offered to him by three giant competing capitalist networks or a single giant noncompetitive socialist network. It is important, in short, that the superficial variety of one system, or the repulsive grayness of the other, not hide the same deep emptiness of life devoid of meaning.” (From “Growing Up “Outside” in Disturbing the Peace, first published in 1986)

     He writes about a nation-state, Czechoslovakia, from which the Czech Republic emerged on his watch, and he writes about how the particularity of his focus is not patriotic, but rather located in a specific land and the embodied social, political, and cultural histories that live upon it.

     “… And the main worry is one common to all people everywhere: how to deal with one’s life, how to bear and sort out one’s dilemmas, whether they be human, existential, moral, or civic. The fact that I happen to have these dilemmas as a Czech living in Bohemia and not as an Argentinian living in Argentina is obviously related to the fact that we are all from somewhere; and for some reason or other the good Lord decided that I should vex the world and myself here and not in Argentina. In other words, I do not feel our Czechness as a burning or acute problem, and it seems to me that, if our national fate depends on anything, then it depends chiefly on how we acquit ourselves in our human tasks.” (From “The Politics of Hope” in Disturbing the Peace, first published in 1986)

     I know there are a large number of people who will read the above and respond with their version of “bah, humbug!” but I also know that people who feel — in little and big ways and across the political spectrum — the generosity of living that a growing strawberry or sunflower expresses have always exceeded the meanness of bah-humbug sensibility, and we always will. Jesmyn Ward, one of the finest writers of fiction in the English language, describes such exceeding:

    “My [grandmother] Dorothy was the first storyteller of my life. One of the most important lessons she taught me about life and story was this: Tell it straight. Talk about the indentation in the baby’s head, about how that velvet-skinned infant slid out blue, but tell the tale of its sister too. Talk about how she fisted the air and kicked, soft and gasping, in the dresser drawer. When you tell the story of the childhood visits to the white auntie, talk about the dense, gasoline-infused trunk, the fishhook of terror in a child’s neck at every other car’s headlight, at every fire burning in the distance, but also talk about how those same children played in the dirt when they weren’t working or schooling, how those same children spun games out of thin air where they competed one with the other to create the prettiest, best-decorated grave. How they made crucifixes from oak twigs, crafted flowers from pine needles. How showing love to the dead meant winning. How my grandmother knew from childhood that love and loss were twins in life. How beauty and sorrow kept company, but you could wrest joy from the pairing.” (From “Why Fiction Matters” — first published 2023) in On Witness and Respair)

***
​
     The United States is a young nation-state that emerged 250 years ago, proclaiming in the preamble to its constitution:

     We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

     I came to this nation-state as a student, by choice, and after many years of residence here became a citizen, by choice. This is now my country.
     We are a young nation-state, but the notion of country is older and conveys a deep connection of land and inhabitant, with relationships of sentiment and meaning to both the land and other inhabitants of the same territory. In Bengali, the language of my parents, desh is the translation for the English word “country.” In Bengali, traditionally, if you asked someone what their desh is, they would name a local area, often one or a  few villages. In French, pays, also translated often as country, is used traditionally to name local places of rooted habitation.
     I am now a citizen of the United States, in the bureaucratic sense of citizenship, nation-state, and passport; but more importantly this is my country, where my transplanted self is deeply rooted. I am American, with all of the complications — the “beauty and sorrow” — that that identification carries. Though an immigrant, as an American I own the beauty of the old-growth forest near my home, and the extinguishing of peoples and cultures for the creation of this nation-state I chose. I, yes descended from colonized people (but also coming from both caste and class privilege), am accountable also for the wealth here that I have benefited from that was built substantially on the exploitation of enslaved people. I grew first within the syncretic, hierarchical, and colonized cultures of independent India, and now I partake of and contribute to syncretic — settler-colonial, colonized, and, dare I say,  indigenized — cultures of this country. I use “indigenized” not as an appropriation of Indigenous or Native American rootedness but rather as an extension of Kimmerer’s notion of indigeneity “in place.”

“After all these generations since Columbus, some of the wisest of Native elders still puzzle over the people who came to our shores. They look at the toll on the land and say, “The problem with these new people is that they don’t have two feet on the shore. One is still on the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they’re staying or not.” This same observation is heard from some contemporary scholars who see in the social pathologies and relentlessly materialist culture the fruit of homelessness, a rootless past. America has been called the home of second chances. For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second Man [reference to the Skywoman origin story of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region] may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become Indigenous to place. But can Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore?” (From “In the Footsteps of Nanbozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place” in Braiding Sweetgrass first published in 2013)

     Can this be our country?
     Nation-states are young. Countries are grounded and relational. Cultural traditions are old, but culture is dynamic, always young. Migration and hybridity have been features of human communities, indeed life itself, from the beginning, spinning out variations and what seems new, new, and new again.
     “We the People” began with a very narrow sense of who counted as a full person, but that glorious word “People” is generously indistinct and fully human. The People, with multiple and contending histories, are the holders of democracy as the political form of this nation-state. 

***

     On this 250th anniversary of this young nation-state, what would it mean to have a democracy of histories, a creative ferment of histories? That, indeed, would be a true democracy. I’m not talking about denial of histories dissonant from the ones most familiar to us in our bodies; I’m not talking about apathetic relativism; nor am I imagining a simple equality of histories for histories are never equal. I’m imagining multiple histories, multiply inflected, each with particular inflections that are embodied and lodged in a soul. Each of us, within us, is a contentious democracy of histories. In our democracy — in dynamic and generative contention that expresses griefs, hopes, wounding dissonances, and the opening up of new understanding and possibility — we could reveal the inflections in our individual and collective souls and contend with the embodied inflections in the souls of others, thus expanding rather than losing our sense of “Americanness,” humanness, and being. 
     I’m imagining a contention of histories, a democratic, lawful, relational contention. I’m imagining contention with high emotion, even anger, in the service of relationship and change, contention that is neither violent nor quiet, that expresses fully and interactively “the grief of distortions among peers” (Audre Lorde, from “The Uses of Anger” in Sister Outsider, first spoken in 1981) rather than letting greed, fear, and grief catalyze “hatred” which separates and demonizes, closes off and seeks to destroy — often both physically and discursively — humans whose difference is scorned and feared, or feared and scorned. 
     The three photos at the top of this essay show both the confluence of three physical paths and multiple histories of connection to land, hope, violence, pain, decimation of peoples and cultures, immigrant and hybrid peoples and cultures, monetized profit-making, and the layered beauty of an old-growth forest.
     The photo below is of a United States 250th anniversary celebration in Philadelphia. At that event, the crowds sat together between Independence Hall and the National Constitution Center. I was with two friends, also citizens of the United States, whose histories are apparently different from mine; on examination, however, syncretism and hybridity — even across our histories — go back centuries or longer. Then, starting almost forty-five years ago, our personal histories met and, since that time, our histories have repeatedly met and diverged. Each of the three of us have had multiple meetings with multiple people — among Americans, these have included descendants of Indigenous peoples of this land as well as descendants of diverse African, Asian, European, and Latin American peoples — with each meeting producing new shared and sometimes contentious histories. The three of us were among thousands both like and unlike us: different histories, in each case dynamic, and with strands that intersect including in that day’s collective celebration of a work in progress, which — get used to it — will always be a work in progress. 
​     We the People…