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Myriam Gurba

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    • WORDS OF REVOLUTION; WORDS OF SOLICE: A BLUE STOOP VIRTUAL FUNDRAISER
    • Particulate Matter–Felicia Luna Lemus in conversation with Myriam Gurba
    • After American Dirt: Criticism as Liberation
    • P&P Live! Maria Hinojosa | ONCE I WAS YOU with Myriam Gurba
    • “The Real American Dirt: Roberto Lovato in conversation with Myriam Gurba”
    • The Chicano Rebellion Reconsidered 50 Years Later
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News

Tasteful Rude: Facism Goes to School

January 12, 2021 by Myriam Leave a Comment

Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini, former elementary school teacher

I wrote about gendered pathways to authoritarianism and the dangers of fascism in the classroom. Read the rest at TastefulRude.com

Before Benito Mussolini became Italy’s fascist dictator, he worked as a schoolteacher. I find this bit of trivia about Il Duce telling. Most children have their first encounter with public authoritarianism in a classroom, I certainly did, and I’ve heard it quipped that what white men are to policing, white women are to public education. Both of these professions can serve as gendered pathways to small-scale authoritarianism.

According the Department of Education, the average schoolteacher in the United States is a 43-year-old white woman. In 2016, 47% of white women voted for President Donald Trump. In 2020, that number rose to 55% Columnist Moira Donegan has noted that the high level of support Trump enjoys from white women has elicited “exasperation” and “rage” from the left. Because I’ve worked in public education among middle-aged white women for over a decade, I’m unsurprised by these numbers as well as by this bloc’s enthusiasm for an autocratic strongman.

Read the rest on TastefulRude.com

Filed Under: Tasteful Rude

Introducing Tasteful Rude

December 11, 2020 by Myriam Leave a Comment

myriam guey

Today I launch my new website Tasteful Rude, as part of the Brickhouse Cooperative, a group of journalists . I’m the editor-in-chief, and one of the writers. Tasteful Rude’s editorial voice eschews politeness in favor of truth-seeking and fun. It is Tasteful Rude’s mission to abide by Edward’s Said’s commandment: “Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse.” Here’s my introduction:

Dear Reader,

When I was a little girl, I sipped black coffee.

I also dreamt.

One of the things I fantasized about was growing tall. My family does produce statuesque Mexicans so I believed that this goal was attainable. As a result of early childhood caffeination, I topped out at five feet. Tasteful Rude, however, is the manifestation of another early dream.

Like many families, mine strengthened its bonds through communal television watching and one of the weekly programs we (nerdily) enjoyed together was 60 Minutes. The newsmagazine taught us about a range of current events, issues, and public and private figures and my brother, sister, and I would warm the couch as the program’s correspondents shed light on our weird world. (There were, though, moments that I suspected we were being lied to. I saw the episode where then-Governor Bill Clinton told journalist Steve Kroft that his relationship with Gennifer Flowers was “friendly but limited.” MENTIRAS!)

In addition to philandering politicians, 60 Minutes also introduced my siblings and me to criticism, commentary, and satire and while I found the show’s reporting interesting, what really secured my status as a fan was a treat that concluded the program.

“I could do that!” I thought as we laughed at “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney.”

I adored Rooney, a masculine frump who Morley Safer once described as “having the demeanor of an unmade bed.” Rooney did my dream job. He drew his paycheck by having an opinion and spreading it and he’d launch his weekly commentary, which he delivered as a monologue set to a curmudgeonly cadence, from a desk messier than my dad’s. “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney” inspired me, proving to me that a commentator didn’t have to be cute for people to listen to her. A critic could be as ugly as Andy Rooney as long as she made what she said about the world compelling.

Rooney typically began his monologues by describing a situation that seemed undeserving of further consideration. However, as Rooney complained, it grew clear that he’d identified a problem in need of critical attention. The opening lines of a 1980 segment demonstrate Rooney’s approach: “It’s a mystery to me why people fight to have either a political convention or the Olympics held in their city. It’s like bidding to have World War III fought in your area because of all the money the war brings local businessmen.” 

With a cup of black coffee in hand and “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney” in mind, I would pace my childhood home, practicing cultural criticism:

“It’s a mystery to me why my mother thinks I won’t recognize that Santa Claus’s handwriting looks identical to hers. What does she take me for? An elf? While I might be short, I…” 

“It’s a mystery to me why my best friend’s father hides his Playboy Magazines under the bathroom sink. The magazines are filled with beautiful women! Why not display them on the toilet tank? It’s important to show guests hospitality and…”

“It’s a mystery to me why I must shop for a training bra. I have nothing to train. As Judy Blume wrote in Superfudge…”

My understanding of criticism, commentary, and analysis has evolved but my concern and commitment to these phenomena remain as strong as ever. For better or worse, Tasteful Rude is influenced by early touchstones like “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney” and it’s not a mystery why I prioritize shit-talking. Shit-talking entertains. It also paves the way for justice.  Criticism is a tool of liberation, mine and yours, and I look forward to taking this caffeinated journey with you.

Yours in shit-talking,

Myriam Gurba

11 December, 2020 www.tastefulrude.com

Filed Under: News, Tasteful Rude

From Persephone To Tara Reade, Rape Victims Are Relegated To Everyday Hells

December 9, 2020 by Myriam Leave a Comment

silence encourage rapists
For those who have wondered what it’s like to run into your rapist, unintentionally, years after assault, my latest in Luz Collective is for you.

I’m glad English speakers took the word schadenfreude from the Germans. Adopting it was an emotionally intelligent move. The affective vocabulary English speakers rely on is slim and I look forward to the day that we develop a language abundant enough to articulate our internal hellscapes with precision. 

Until then, we’re left fumbling, unable to name so many crappy states, including one that’s been on my mind since watching a TikTok video by anti-rape activist Wagatwe Wanjuki.

As Wanjuki lip syncs, “Actual goals, AF!” her TikTok performance unfolds to the tune and lyrics of Eva Gutowski’s Literally My Life. Clad in athleisure, Wanjuki flashes a grin and a thumb’s up sign. Glitter splashes across the screen and she imitates a victory dance while this message hovers overhead: “Me finding out my rapist graduated law school and became a lawyer.”

Wanjuki’s video spoofs the inverted schadenfreude to which rape culture subjects sexual assault victims. I’ve experienced variations of this state. It’s an absurd horror, well-suited for satirical or parodic interpretations given that rape victims living in the United States navigate a two-faced society. This duality comes into focus when the supposed illegality of sexual assault is juxtaposed against criminal justice data.

According to the nation’s penal code, rape ranks among the worst of crimes, a felony whose perpetrators deserve to be locked in cages. Criminal justice statistics, however, tell a much different story. According to RAINN, “perpetrators of sexual violence are less likely to go to jail or prison than other criminals.” In fact, “out of 1000 sexual assaults, 995 perpetrators will walk free.” These numbers underscore that rape is more accurately described as a theoretical crime. The volume of perpetrators walking among us shows that the ability to commit sexual assault free of repercussions is anything but rare. Instead, rape is a commonly exercised privilege.

Those of us who are the victims of rapists experience the ramifications of sexual assault across our lifespans. One of the ugliest and most painful dimensions of rape’s aftermath is exactly what Wanjuki so brilliantly communicated through TikTok. Rape culture requires the majority of sexual assault victims to co-exist in a society where our rapists do more than move freely. In a rape culture, our attackers thrive.

December 9, 2020. Read it at Luz Collective

Filed Under: Luz Collective, News

Believer.com: Chismosa Bitch

December 2, 2020 by Myriam Leave a Comment

“On vocabulary test after vocabulary test, Mrs. Braun dragged her red pen across nouns, gleefully deducting points for my ‘bad Spanish.’”

I wrote about Spanglish fluency and getting a B in Spanish for The Believer.

Several weeks into attending my graveyard-adjacent nursery school, my parents noticed something weird. When I got home from school, I’d grab Mom’s or Dad’s hand and take them on a tour, introducing them to household objects. “This is the television. This is a chair. This is a sofa. This is a plate. That is a lamp. This is its switch. The lamp is now off.” My behavior mystified Dad until he realized what I was doing and burst out laughing.

“Bebé,” he called out, “Myriam’s teachers think she can’t speak English! They’ve been trying to teach her! That’s why she acts like a parrot when she comes home! She’s parroting the ‘lessons’ they’re giving her.” He chuckled as hard as he did when he watched Saturday Night Live. While I find it funny that I mimicked these lessons, I also find it a little spooky. Were the “pioneers” posthumously colonizing my vocal cords? Were their ghosts speaking English through me?

Read it at believermag.com

Filed Under: News Tagged With: magazine article

PARTICULATE MATTER–FELICIA LUNA LEMUS IN CONVERSATION WITH MYRIAM GURBA

November 21, 2020 by Myriam Leave a Comment

Felicia Luna Lemus released her 3rd book, PARTICULATE MATTER, a gorgeous, compact real-life queer love story, which she and I discussed (among otras cosas)

Filed Under: Events, News

New on Luz Collective: Racial Pretendians

November 18, 2020 by Myriam Leave a Comment

After taking a sip of wine, Dad explained that certain Americans like inventing stories, especially tales that turn them into native people. Dad’s thesis illuminated nothing. The girl’s behavior still made no sense.

“But why?” I demanded.

“They think it’s exotic,” Dad over-asserted the word exotic to heighten its vulgarity, “and, it eases their conscience. It makes them feel better.”

“Better about what?”

“About taking things.”

“Ooooooh,” I uttered as the puzzle pieces slid together. By things, Dad meant the lands called the United States of America. Still, I didn’t want to believe that my friend, or her family, were liars, and so, I did the work of whiteness: I continued to defend her innocence.

“But she really could be part Cherokee!” I insisted.

Dad replied, “Yes. Or she might be a typical Anglo American who insists that she’s 1/16 Cherokee and descended from a princess whose name nobody seems to know.” 

“HOW DID YOU KNOW THE PRINCESS PART?!” I yelled. “AND THE 1/16 PART?!!”

Dad sighed, exasperated. “Because it’s always the same damn story. Now eat your ejotes!”

Dad was on to something. The lies my classmate told me closely resemble the fabrications for which various racial and ethnic fakes have recently been held to account. Last year, Jeanine Cummins, a writer who had publicly identified as an unelaborated white lady, began announcing herself as both a “Latinx woman” and “boricua.” It was noted by many who followed her story that her attempt at claiming a spicy identity coincided with the publication of her highly anticipated novel, American Dirt. That book, a narco-thriller set in México, fetishizes immigration to the point of unintended satire. It’s a fun book to hate-read.

Cummins is perhaps the most prominent among this new crop of Dolezalitas. Others include BethAnn McLaughlin, a white woman and former assistant professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University. McLaughlin crafted a pretendian Twitter persona, @sciencing_bi. The persona remained unnamed but, over time, @sciencing_bi developed an elaborate identity, that of a Hopi anthropology professor working at Arizona State University. On July 31, McLaughlin killed her nameless invention, announcing on Twitter that @sciencing_bi had died of COVID-19. Shortly thereafter, an ASU spokesperson exposed McLaughlin’s hoax. The outing prompted McLaughlin to pander for pity. She blamed her bad behavior on an unnamed mental illness.

Read on Luz Collective

Filed Under: Luz Collective, News Tagged With: american dirt, luz collective, magazine article, race, racial faker

Remezcla: ‘A Harm-Reduction Strategy’: Biden Was Elected, Now What?

November 13, 2020 by Myriam Leave a Comment

‘A Harm-Reduction Strategy’: Biden Was Elected, Now What?
November 13, 2020
K Romero*, a Mexican immigrant living in Pennsylvania, remains vigilant. After the 2016 election, Romero became active with a local progressive organization, but a commonplace obstacle soon emerged. The organization privileged the needs of white Democrats above everybody else’s, leaving women of color, like Romero, out in the proverbial cold. Racial exhaustion triggered Romero’s flight from the group but because she understands that authoritarian threats linger, she feels pulled back to activism four years later.

“I’m not going to sit and watch as fascism continues to rise,” she tells Remezcla. “I’m ready. I want to organize with a network of like-minded women of color. I’m just clueless about where to start.”

Many people living in the United States share Romero’s activated yet disoriented sentiments. Four years of overt racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, religious extremism, anti-intellectualism, and anti-science policies have yielded a situation that mess doesn’t begin to describe. The forces strengthened by the Trump cult continue to endanger us and, while the election of Joe Biden signals some symbolic and material change, many activists and organizers understand a Biden administration not as a one-stop electoral solution but as a harm-reduction strategy. As historian Thomas Zimmer has written, the uphill battle of transforming the United States from a “white Christian nation, in which white Christian men are at the top” to “a multi-racial democracy that abolishes patriarchal rule” continues.

Read more at Remezcla.com

Filed Under: News, Remezcla, Uncategorized Tagged With: magazine article, politics, Remezcla

Luz: When Pornography Invades Privacy

October 29, 2020 by Myriam Leave a Comment

Toobin

In my latest for Luz Collective I discuss Jeffrey Toobin, the myth of the “accidental assault”, and the pervasiveness of the ‘oops’ defense.

“I taught high school for over a decade and my years spent working with U.S. teenagers taught me that many girls’ first experiences of sexual assault now happen through screens. One way that boys assault through the screen is by sending their female classmates pictures or videos of genitalia, and I’ve seen various male teachers, staff, and administrators treat such assaults as if they were child’s play. These enablers and apologists fail to acknowledge the power asymmetry that exists between a male sender and his female target, an imbalance that includes the recipient’s inability to unsee pornography intentionally placed in her line of sight.

These optic violations constitute a form of visual rape and these problems bring us to a now-infamous October 19, zoom meeting attended by employees of WNYC radio and The New Yorker. Vice became the first outlet to report on the aftermath of the notorious call, announcing that The New Yorker had suspended Jeffrey Toobin, one of its staff writers, for masturbating on video. Toobin claimed that he was unaware that his camera was on and The New York Times further reported that Toobin was participating in a secondary phone sex video-call when he exposed himself.

Media men and everyday men moved quickly to defend Toobin and a survey of their defenses suggests that these men spent minimal time contemplating notions like consent, boundary, or incursion. Their defenses also sounded much like the excuses I’ve heard trumpeted when adolescent boys ambush female classmates with homemade pornography.

Read on luzcollective.com

Filed Under: Luz Collective, News

HOW THE TERM ‘ESSENTIAL WORKER’ OBSCURES THE COST OF RACIALIZED HUMAN LIFE

October 5, 2020 by Myriam Leave a Comment

farm workers

How the Term ‘Essential Worker’ Obscures the Cost of Racialized Human Life
October 5, 2020
“The Latino community is suffering a lot right now,” says Arnulfo Romero. The former field supervisor lives in Santa Maria, California, an agricultural community that, depending on which way its sea breeze blows, smells of strawberry, broccoli, or diesel. The town is small by California standards, populated by about 107,000 residents. Most, like Romero, are Latino of Mexican origin. Many are also Indigenous (primarily Mixteco).

While the Santa Maria Valley’s berry crops have sweetened the region’s reputation, its large concentration of COVID-19 infections now brings notoriety.

“Santa Maria’s number of coronavirus deaths has been higher than anywhere else in Santa Barbara County,” Romero laments. “The only place that looked like it was going to outpace Santa Maria was the prison in Lompoc. But it got worse here.”
remezcla.com

Filed Under: News, Remezcla Tagged With: magazine article, race, Remezcla

MYRIAM GURBA SPEAKS TO FEMINIST GIANT MONA ELTAHAWY ABOUT REVOLUTION!

September 9, 2020 by Myriam Leave a Comment

A conversation with the author of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls
September 9, 2020
Mona Eltahawy secured my eternal devotion after I first read her self-described declaration of faith: “Fuck the patriarchy.” I, too, am a member of this faith and I live my faith through guerrilla-style tactics which I execute daily. My favorite tactic is withholding laughter from unfunny men who are under the impression that they are otherwise. A feminist giant, Mona is a writer, activist and revolutionary whose most recent book, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, not only defends women’s anger, it celebrates it. I spoke with Mona about the radical changes she’s embarking on as a writer and publisher, technology and revolution, sexual and romantic terrorism, and ugliness.

This interview is part of my new magazine, Tasteful Rude, launching December 8 as part of the Brick House Cooperative. For a transcript of my interview with Mona, go to TastefulRude.com.

Filed Under: News, Tasteful Rude, Uncategorized Tagged With: Brick House Collective, Feminism, Interview, Mona Eltahawy

Rice a Rona

March 28, 2020 by Myriam Leave a Comment

I hear Mike Myers’ voice emanating, yes, emanating, from the living room.

“Have we descended into Wayne’s World?” I holler at little brother.

I peer around the counter separating the kitchen table from Mike Myers presence. Little brother glances up from his tea. He raises a hand in the air. It makes a V for victory which also indicates el número dos.

This isn’t just Wayne’s World. It’s the sequel.

Sorry to interrupt with politics but I’d prefer not to have a white man for president. I’d rather Wayne than what we have though because what we have is a what and not a who. At least Wayne is working class. He knows what it’s like to ride shotgun in a Gremlin. He dates women of color. He cares about his friends and community.

Like you, I am imaginationally and attentionally challenged right now.

I’m writing at little brother’s kitchen table.

“Did you hear they’re making Wayne’s World 3?” he hollers.

I can’t imagine anyone making a movie right now.

I can’t imagine anyone making a movie ever again though that’s not true. I can totally imagine it. It’ll be the first feature film made via TikTok.

There’ll be a new award for this genre, the Toskars.

I’ve never spent this much time with little brother in confinement. He spent a shitload of time with my sister in a confined space called mom. They’re twins. Please do not ask me if they are identical.

According to reality, I’ve spent seven days with my brother. It feels like seven months. He spent seven months in the womb with our sister, a doctor wrangled them free prematurely, and I may have irked little brother last night when I shouted at him, “I’m your new twin!” He raised an eyebrow, sipped his tea, and cracked his knuckles.

There are tales about twins eating twins in hostile wombs.

Mortal wombat.

Little brother has a nameless iguana. Well, he calls it iguana. The job of an intellectual is to name things. I can’t tell if the iguana is staring at me or asleep but I’m pretty sure he’s staring through those slits. The iguana hates people. He’s a misanthrope, like Ebenezer Scrooge without the humbugs. The iguana lives in a large glass aquarium. I could hop into the aquarium with him and we would still have room to fit my brother and sister. We’d be cramped triplets.

On a table next to where I sit teems a box filled with live crickets. They wait to be fed to other things living in this house. I’m not sure how many animals in addition to us are in here. I know there are couple of snakes around these parts and sometimes they get loose. When that happens, and little brother can’t find them, he waits for a scream. The fear allows him to echolocate his friends.

In the living room, actors are not practicing social distancing. Kim Basinger is doing her laundry at a Wayne’s World laundromat and Garth is leering at her. He’s into her and so he offers her red rope licorice and she accepts it and eats it sexily and this strikes me as so dangerous and taboo and cavalier and I feel like I’m writing a low rent version of the Decameron. Have you read the Decameron? I haven’t looked at that thing in a long time, not since I was an undergrad doing medieval history, pestilence and plagues.

The Decameron was written by an Italian, Giovanni Boccaccio, who I always think of as Bitchacho. The book tells about a bunch of Florentines who split town and go into the countryside to escape the Black Death, wait it out. There’s no FaceTime or Zoom or Instagram Live so these motherfuckers take turns telling stories. They tell a series of tales. That’s it. That’s the tweet. The tales are what you’d expect. Stories of sluts. Stories of people falling in toilets. Real Renaissance subjects.

“Ci cacciano in cucina a dir delle favole colla gatta,” rants one of Bitchacho’s lady narrators. “They banish us to the kitchen, there to tell stories to the cat.” She’s describing what happens to women in “old age” but on planet earth 2020, humanity has been collectively banished to the kitchen. And I am on the verge of telling stories to the iguana.

I could tell the iguana about how in high school, in my economics class, for extra credit, I wrote a research paper on the Black Death. My econ teacher gave me a B. I told myself that it was okay that I got a B even though I wanted an A. I told myself, “F is for Fabulous. B is for Bubonic.”

Everybody has got cinematic and literary epidemics on the brain because of mimesis or whatever. A plague fucked up fertility in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and it seems like canonical white literature having to do with ‘demics involves tales. Tales structure the white telling.

Trump tells tales during his press conferences on the rona. Rice a Rona. My brain is doing this thing where anything it can ronize, it will. Remember that Bobby Brown song Roni…?

Irony becomes irona.

Little Brother's Iguana
Little Brother’s Iguana

Filed Under: News

Carne De Res Ipsa Loquitur

March 21, 2020 by Myriam 2 Comments


family portrait

When they first elected dumbass, scads of white men assured me that his buffoonery would be he his undoing. I remember one who grinned at me, baring his teeth as he condescended. He wore a lab coat and spoke to me in a tone I can’t imagine he’d use with a dude patient. “Don’t worry about him,” he said. “He’ll self-destruct.”

The doctor couldn’t see what was clear those of us forced to lurk in the margins, that free-range buffoonery doesn’t only harm the buffoon.

Free range dipshits cause collective harm.

. .

When discussing the dipshit-in-chief, my naysayers seldom sounded disgusted. Instead, they often sounded amused and slightly envious, as if they were discussing a devilish manchild pulling a looooooooooooong practical joke that we were somehow required to endure and figure out how to make the most of. You know, April 1st as political regime.

It was never funny to me though. Sure there have been funny things about it, funny moments, but the thing itself? No, the thing itself isn’t funny.

. . .

Like you, I opened my eyes the morning after the 2016 election.

Shit felt urgent.

I ran to the toilet.

After my diarrhea concluded, the bathroom smelled like what the electorate had done.

. . . .

Did that November give you the shits too?

Did you know that the shits are a symptom of COVID-19?

The shits are a sign of the times.

. . . . .

I have witnessed grown men rooting for toilet paper like truffle pigs.

. . . . . .

Do you remember those “halcyon days” when they talked about politically quarantining him? People would talk about the possibility of governing around him. They discussed doing so as if it was plausible. When I listened to these discussions, I’d imagine an abscess. Behind a wall of skin and pus, he sulked. Whose body was he trapped in? Yours? Mine? Ours? I was once trapped in my mom. And my dad. I prefer not to think about myself swimming in my dad though I did write a poem about it. The poem was called “Squirtle.”

. . . . . . .

I tend not to the think of our polity as a body. When I think of people forming a body, I get Catholickly triggered. Body of Christ. The church as a living body, a parochial organism. My parents raised me to be a Catholic but religion disappointed me before puberty ruined my life. My parents enrolled me in catechism classes to prepare me to make my first communion, to ready me to eat Jesus. The day that I finally let him melt in my mouth disappointed me.

He tasted like gluten. I’d been expecting meat.

. . . . . . . .

Now I’ve been ordered to isolate. Perhaps you’ve been ordered to isolate. We’re trying to survive a pandemic, an outbreak of a novel virus. There are befores, there are afters, and there are durings. We’re in a during. I’ve been thinking about the way things were before we went inside. I keep thinking of a moment at work, at school. English teachers had assigned Huxley and students who’d been dragging their feet were trying to cram his dystopian novel for a test.

Have you ever watched someone try to read Brave New World in fifteen minutes? It’s an ambitious gesture.

. . . . . . . . .

My mom has gone from coronaque? to before-we-die-tell-our-stories-tell-the-stories-of-mommy-and-daddy. She urged me to do so in a light-hearted way but even the light-hearted is heavy right now.

. . . . . . . . . .

Last month, school administrators forced me to take administrative leave. Someone deemed me a “disruptive” force and they ejected me from my classroom and told me to stay home. I felt shunned.

It seemed they were trying to quarantine me as a result of my politics.

. . . . . . . . . .
.

Looks like we’re all on forced leave now.

I’m not gloating. Not at all. Just commenting.

. . . . . . . . . .
. .

We’re all in this alone together.

We’re all in this together alone.

Where are you located, anatomically speaking, in our body politic?

Are you in the head? Are you in the respiratory system? Are you below the belt? Are you hair, skin, or teeth? Do you secrete? Are you a gland?

I might be a vestigial organ.

I might be the spleen.

. . . . . . . . . .
. . .

Yes, it’s weird to be ordered to stay home and to keep a distance of six feet from others. People call it quarantine though I think sheltering is a better term. Self-isolation is fine too. It gets to the point.

Many of us have lived in isolation before.

. . . . . . . . . .
. . . .

I’m worried about my uncle Henry.

Once upon a Cold War, our government drafted him to go do terrible things in Vietnam. He served in the jungles as an artillery officer. He killed people. He returned unable to stop hearing the screams of adults, children, and babies he killed.

A psychiatrist diagnosed him with schizophrenia, a phenomena which can result in incredible social isolation.

When Henry speaks, I watch listeners become overwhelmed. Henry talks in poetry. His language is mostly metaphor and synecdoche, a word I’ve seen teenagers add a ‘u’ to. A lot of people have a hard time processing incredibly poetic speech so rather than try, they turn away from Henry and ignore him. I’ve watched people do this to him over and over.

He became homeless for a while and then lived in his childhood home for a bit and then we, his family, worked to get him into a skilled nursing facility. Henry has hardware in his hip now. Parkinson’s shakes him. He suffers from chronic urinary tract infections and last year, a surgeon removed a stone the size of a Russet potato from his bladder. The surgeon asked to keep it. He said he wanted to display in the hospital museum.

Last week, the director of facility where Henry lives called me.

“You’re the one I see here all the time?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s great.” He paused. “We’re calling all of our patients’ families to ask that you not visit. We’re trying to limit exposure to coronavirus.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “Not a problem.”

He sighed with relief. “Good. Some families haven’t taken it so well.”

“We’re not going to give you grief. We’ll obey the order. It’s important.”

“Thank you.”

Henry had surgery the other day. My dad was allowed to see him.

They sat alone in isolation together. Henry looked at my dad.

“We’re getting old,” he said.

My dad answered, “I’m not,” and made a joke about being twenty- one.

. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . .

I thought that my great grandma, the one I’m named for, my tocaya, died during the 1918 flu pandemic.

She did not.

. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . .

My great grandma worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy family in New York.

She was young, Polish and divorced.

She parented an only child, my grandpa Peter.

. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . .

I’ve seen one photo of my tocaya.

She wears a white Victorian dress to her ankles. A belt with a butterfly-shaped buckle cinches her small waist. Her blond hair is swept into a Gibson-girl-esque bun. Liplessly and defiantly, she stares into the camera, smile-free.

I love that the only picture of my Polish housekeeping great grandma doesn’t front.

Her facial expression says life is hard and so am I.

. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .

My great grandma loosened her corset to cough. She coughed so much that health officials sent her to Roosevelt Island. There, in a public hospital, she coughed herself to death. In isolation, tuberculosis ended her short, blond life.

. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .

My grandpa attended his mom’s funeral. He was a little boy, at an age where sugar is everything, and after the service, his aunt handed him two pennies. My grandpa went to the store and exchanged the coins for hard candy.

When he returned to his new home, his aunt’s house, she asked him, “Where are the pennies I handed you?”

My grandpa showed her the candy.

She smacked him. She scolded, “Those were the pennies that we placed on your mother’s eyes!”

Sometimes, when I smell copper, I think of my tocaya’s eyes.

They were blue. Goethe, whose name I always feel funny saying aloud, wrote about this color. He said, “The appearance of objects seen through a blue glass is gloomy and melancholy.”

This essay might be a little blue but don’t worry. Blue is just a color.

Henry Gurba

Filed Under: News

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