Megan Skelly
Editorial Letter
The coronavirus crisis, if nothing else, has given me pause to deeply reconsider the notion of space as it relates to identity: the spaces we / I inhabit, the spaces we no longer can, and how we perceive connection across distance and time. The walls of small, overcrowded living spaces feel like they’re closing in, while the now-empty streets gape like missing teeth; social distancing has us apart and together all at once. In this extreme state, the ever-present flaws of an already imbalanced society glare more menacingly than ever. Essential workers (often with lower-paying jobs) are forced to go out, domestic violence victims are forced to stay in, communities of color are being disproportionately affected by contagion rates, and all of us are encouraged to be islands unto ourselves or risk harming those around us in what feels like one endless day bleeding into the next. In this fraught environment, I have tried to weave together strands of research that I collected both before and after the pandemic shut down New York City’s libraries and archives to reflect upon the ways that art emerges from the ruins to unite us in times of upheaval.
In my first piece, I seek to curiously engage with the cultural legacy of East Harlem, where I am a new resident as of the beginning of this year. Upon first glance, I am probably the poster child for gentrification: a young, white, college-educated individual that recently relocated to Harlem. All of these qualifiers are true, and I won’t deny that my access to certain resources more than likely outweighs what others in the community have available. The seed of the poem is an actual encounter that I had on the street, where a man lashed out at me in anger as I was walking; his words stuck with me and became a refrain that I used to navigate the complex threads of race, class and history that Harlem intertwines like no other place. It was also largely inspired by a beautiful Langston Hughes quote on Harlem that I came across: “Melting pot Harlem—Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown…” (Hughes, 314).
As the child of an adopted mother whose roots (supposedly) stretch a few generations back to Italy, I became fascinated by the pathology of the Italian immigrants that had relocated to East Harlem in droves around the time of the Harlem Renaissance and their interactions with black and Puerto Rican people in the neighborhood. Most Italians were not considered white at the time and were perceived as racially inferior, but would later play significant roles in oppressing people of color in order to assimilate into the dominant American culture. This is a snippet of the popular views of the period: “On his own trip into Harlem’s Italian neighborhood, he found ‘reprehensible neglect of the commonest laws of decency. Beer and tobacco, garlic and filth, quarrel and stiletto, noise and noxious odors alternate and fill up the gamut of these people’s lives, to the disgust and weariness of soul of all near-by people who have a fractional claim to respectability and culture” (Guglielmo, 99). Gender and sexuality added other layers to the piece as well, when I read a chapter on the racialization of Italian women and came across a prominent study that made this claim: “Lombroso’s comments on the photographs of three such ‘homicidal women’ noted ‘swollen lips’ and ‘deep furrows in her forehead’ as evidence of innate criminality, without considering if this was the result of a lifetime of horrific abuse” (Guglielmo, 85). I interlaced imagery from all of the reading I had done to lend my work further echoes of that era’s authentic expressions as I continue to probe the dynamics of my own entrance here.
For my second piece, I wanted to delve into the concept of time as a cyclical entity as a means of coping with the COVID fear and isolation. I was particularly sparked by a line from a Gayl Jones novel I happened to be reading on the side that felt so fitting in articulating this concept: “My veins are centuries meeting” (Jones, 42). Looking out the window, it’s hard to believe that exactly a hundred years ago, the Renaissance was jumping off on these very blocks when now the streets seem so deserted. But the truth is, the movement emerged out of another devastating period in world history, coming on the heels of World War 1 and the Spanish influenza outbreak. While doing some peripheral research on World War 1, I discovered that it was the first time that poison gas had ever been used as a weapon, necessitating the widespread usage of gas masks – the parallel was striking to me. I became taken with the thought that mouths and hands are the outlets for creative genius, even as they currently pose a threat to our very existence through the spread of contagion. In my mind, this potential for creation or destruction (or both simultaneously) captures the raw essence that allowed for such a singular period in human history to arise in the 1920’s. Much of the beauty that was created then in literature, music and visual art was still very much marred by the blights of racism and sexism on the American landscape, even as it strove to seize the new fervor of celebration and survival as an impetus for self-definition. This is my hope for us all collectively as we navigate the uncertainty of what is and will be birthed from this “new normal” we have entered: that we continue to use art as we always have, to rise from the ashes and to inform, inspire and entertain in seasons of joy and of pain.
WORKS CITED
Guglielmo, Jennifer. Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945, University of North Carolina Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ccny-ebooks/detail.action?docID=565692.
Hughes, Langston. “My Early Days in Harlem.” Freedomways: A Quarterly Review of the Negro Freedom Movement Special Issue: Harlem, a Community in Transition, edited by Shirley Graham, Freedomways Associates, 1963, pp. 312-314.
Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Boston, Beacon Press, 1975.
