Scar Tissue

Published March 1, 2017 in slightly edited form in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     It’s March.  Black History Month has come to an end, leaving us with eleven months to lay down more white history, skid marks and all, before we’re reminded once again of our propensity for hubris and brutality.  If the institution of slavery is dead (i.e., “it’s history,”) I’m afraid the economic values still thrive that once allowed us to think it’s OK to own other people or determine their future.

           

     This month, the Dakota Access Pipeline will be completed without apology to the future or to the Standing Rock Sioux, who had the juevos to claim their culture’s deeper ecological understanding and their children’s rights to clean drinking water.  This month, the site of their protest (on land once theirs) will be drowned by the waters of a reservoir stored for urban users downstream, another environmental manipulation with white fingerprints on it.  It’s hard for me to believe we can still be so blind to these crimes, but there it is.

     “Get out of my country,” a deranged man yelled in a bar on the Kansas side of Kansas City last week before shooting three men, two from India, killing one.  Officials did not immediately label this act a hate crime, perhaps because the shooter’s state of derangement was already known.  Age 51, he’s lived with his father his whole life until his father died a year ago, devastating him; clearly he's someone who has not been able to make his own way in this world.  Those two young men from halfway around the globe were not responsible for his lack of place or standing, for his inability to function in this society, but they took the hit for it.

     “I want my country back,” my mother used to say when the last George Bush was in office.  Her sense of dispossession came from a political hierarchy she didn’t believe in generating policies touted as American that she couldn’t abide.  She had a white face to blame for her sense of loss, not black, brown or yellow, but little more recourse than the man from Kansas City.  Having an eight year reprieve helped, but now she just leaves the television off.

           

     “The country’s deeply divided,” we hear over and over in the news without having the fault line mapped that separates us.  Week Four of the new administration in Washington ended with President Trump claiming he’s on track with what he wanted to accomplish.  If keeping the country deeply divided was on that list, he’s right.  But I think what divides us goes deeper than his hubris, and deeper than our mental constructs of race, ethnicity, even class.  I think it comes from land, the source of all wealth:  from who has access to it and who doesn’t.

     Near the beginning of his writing career, Wendell Berry wrote a book about slavery called The Hidden Wound.  It’s really a long personal essay about the black people who were part of his Kentucky tobacco farming family, including some held as slaves, and the cost to whites of the divided consciousness inflicted by that system.  But when I read the book, I came to realize that racism is the excuse our minds create to explain why I (the so-called superior person) should have land and you (the so-called inferior one,) shouldn’t.  And if I, a white person, have become dispossessed of land and/or the wealth derived from it, woe unto you less-than-white people who still have a yard to call your own.

           

     I think we don’t know the divide.  Is it race, or ethnicity, or economic class and education – or is it something else that keeps separating us into artificial categories which keep us fighting over straws?  I think it’s Berry’s hidden wound and our ignorance of land’s critical role in slashing our consciences.  The wound’s scabs have been torn off so often the flesh has not healed normally, but become scar tissue, proudflesh.  I think our future is limited to making more scar tissue until we address what made the initial cut.

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Trudy Wischemann almost has finished editing a book of writings on land and water in California.  Anyone interested in this topic can contact her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a message below.

My Turn at the Crank

Published Nov. 2, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

This is the sixth report from Reedley, where we are holding a speakers series on people, land and water in the San Joaquin Valley.  Called “In the Struggle,” it features individuals who have contributed to the human ecology of this place in the face of its dehumanization from the industrialization of agriculture.

           

     Wendell Berry, one of this nation’s treasures in the realm of sustainable farming and living, has a book called Another Turn of the Crank.  I thought of him as I prepared for my turn at the microphone in our Reedley speakers series.  His writing career took the stage just as I entered the field, a new recruit, and just as Paul Taylor prepared to exit. 

           

     My assignment Friday night was to talk about Paul and the field he carved out for so many of us.  I still remember Paul walking into his office one day with Wendell Berry’s first major work in his hands, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.  Published in 1977, that book started a new national conversation about what is wrong with our industrialized form of agriculture.  It gave my tenacious mentor great hope as his pace slowed, the end of his turn at the crank in sight.

           

     I used many four-letter words there in the First Mennonite fellowship hall:  land, town, farm, hope and love.  I probably even used “hate,” though I try to keep that word at bay.  A couple of one-syllable five-letter words were also key:  “faith,” with its partner “grace.”  Faith and grace have been major components of my work over the last twenty years, though I had to learn them on my own, since my mentors and colleagues rarely identify those factors in their writing.  Yet I see them at work in Villarejo’s stories, and MacCannell’s and Fujimoto’s, and perhaps all the stories.

           

     Where I first learned about faith in this work was in a project I joined near the end of my time at Davis called the Forum on Church and Land.  It was sponsored by the Western Small Church and Rural Life Center based in Filer, Idaho.  The Forum was a Methodist undertaking headed by a minister from Corvallis, Oregon named John Pitney.  John is a dairy kid who grew up to become a stay-at-home father, using his seminary training to take him into the dark space between most churches and what was going on in our rural areas in the 1980’s.  He developed workshops, bible studies and a body of songs to address the devastation no one noticed – except those suffering from bank foreclosures and losing their farms.

           

     John had organized these forums in other states, but right about the time of the 1990 freeze, he was called to bring these ideas to the Central Valley.  Someone gave him my name because I was working on a project called “Agriculture and the Common Good” at the time, and he gently roped me into the planning process for holding a forum here.  We called the event “Who is my Neighbor? Agriculture, the Common Good, and the Role of the Church in Truthtelling and Reconciliation.”  It was held in Fresno in Feb. 1992, and though I was agnostic when we started, during the forum I had a conversion experience. 

           

     Friday night, standing at the microphone in Reedley telling this story to the members of the Peace Center, which includes many Mennonite farmers who are interested in this subject of agriculture and the common good, I could see that the church still has a role to play in mending the breaches in neighborliness created by our industrial agriculture system.

           

     I began by telling my story about research at Berkeley and Davis, which turned toward public education when I moved to Tulare County more than twenty years ago.  Then I described some tools I thought we might use to carry on this legacy of social concern.  One of these tools is the book of writings I’ve been editing with Tulare geographer Bill Preston, a professor at CalPoly SLO.  It’s titled A Little Piece of Land:  Writings on Agriculture and the Common Good in California.  The book contains articles from social scientists, journalists, historians and philosophers, and includes a goodly dose of poems and short stories describing the importance of rural life to individual humans and communities, as well our national well-being. 

           

     I see a role for art in creating the awareness we need to tackle this subject, and an working toward creating a non-profit organization, New LEAF (Land Educational Arts Forum) to help support artistic endeavors in this work.  John Pitney’s songs, contained on three albums and four CD’s, offer a similar promise to encourage churches to take on this role (see www.johnpitney.org.)  And I think holding another Forum on Church and Land would be a way to introduce people into the effort.

           

     One of my favorite Pitney songs is based on a Wendell Berry poem called “To Know the Dark.”  It goes like this:

“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark.  Go without sight. 

And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings. 

And is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.”

            The next speaker in the series will be Dr. Sarah Ramirez, the director of Tulare County FoodLink, speaking on “Good Food Changes Lives.”  She will speak Nov. 11^th.  Go to  www.reedleypeacecenter.org for more information.

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Trudy Wischemann is a recovering researcher who writes in Lindsay.  You can send her your stories on land, town, farm and faith c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to Dan O’Connell for recognizing the baton.