Obsolescence

from Curzio Malaparte's The History of a Manuscript (Kaputt, 1944)

"Let us hope that the new era will really be anew and that writers will enjoy liberty and respect, I say 'let us hope' not because I lack faith in liberty and its benefits—I belong to that group of people who have suffered imprisonment and deportation to the Island of Lipari for their freedom of spirit and their contribution to the cause of liberty—but because we all know how difficult it is in Italy and throughout large sections of Europe to be a human being, and how dangerous it is to be a writer."

These words were written about a time not unlike these, our own. I write with the same hopes and the same sentiment, always attentive to the difficulties of being human and the dangers of being a writer.

I constantly justify my work—novels, Navajo language, traditional arts and culture. Language itself seems to have become obsolete. Hand prepared meals and non gmo food elitist. Home a class struggle by a small percentage of people that refuse to even consider the ethics of occupying an occupied territory.

Even other artists ask me what I get out of writing—what's in it for me. Where is my fun? And why don't I make the change to something shorter and more interactive, something more likely to interface with the contemporary world, not this world I seem to believe in, this world of my grandparents.

They raised me. Their world is not a memory, but a reality I still build, around myself, every morning with herbs ground in my great grandmother's molcajete. We live in the same world, they have gone on, while I remain. This is the world they lived in: facing urbanization, baptism, English only and relocation/deportation. They planted food. They told stories. They embroidered cloth and fabricated garments from the remnants of the food we had eaten—its containers made of cotton, not hide. They clothed us in their knowledge of what it meant to be alive. Life required vision: to be human. This is the kind of human we are: cook, farmer and embroiderer.

They remind me to remember who I am and who I am related to: Navajo, Pueblo, Congolese. Writers make connections according to a grammar they find within their soul. Together, being human and making connections, I am vulnerable to severe fiscal and social punishment. It has always been this way, for a long time, in large sections of Europe and in these United States of America.

My grandparents fought. They fought each other most of all. But their overwhelming disagreement was how to achieve victory, not the absolute need to defeat the lies they found themselves under the weight of. This is their world. We live inside it too.