City

analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action

ISSN: 1360-4813 (Print) 1470-3629 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccit20

Freighted Love: teaching, learning, and making a

home in the maelstrom

Christina Heatherton

To cite this article: Christina Heatherton (2020): Freighted Love: teaching, learning, and making a
home in the maelstrom, City, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2020.1739457

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2020.1739457

Published online: 14 Apr 2020.

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 Freighted Love: teaching,
learning, and making a home in
the maelstrom
Christina Heatherton

In ‘Freighted Love: Teaching, Learning, and Making a Home in the

Maelstrom’ Christina Heatherton describes the connections between
poetry, theories of urban space, and what geographer Clyde Woods
calls ‘blues epistemology.’ In this brief introduction to her three poems,
‘Freighted Love,’ ‘Pedagogy,’ and ‘Invasions,’ Heatherton stresses the
need for these connections in theory and practice. Such an under-
standing, she argues, offers the potential for developing more social-
ly-minded forms of teaching and scholarship as well as ways of being
in the world.

S
itting in a church in Greensboro, North Carolina, I am listening to people
describe the harrowingly ordinary ways they have all lost their homes.
Some explain how simple workplace injuries led swiftly to bankruptcies.
Others suffered double blows: first from common diseases and then again from
punishing medical bills. One physically disabled man relates how his job as an
overnight security guard prevents him from sleeping in homeless shelters since
residents are forbidden to leave at night. He recounts the arduous hike he makes
every day after work to a remote tent, far from electrical outlets or water taps. He
tells us he is hungry and tired. Many have lost homes to natural disasters. After
fires razed the town of Paradise, California, bewildered residents found them-
selves on sidewalks, suddenly harassed by police for being homeless, all while

Keywords poetry, teaching, learning, home, homelessness

URL https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2020.1739457
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 1
City

the charred rubble of their homes still smoldered around them. In those same
fires, undocumented farmworkers and their families dodged flames, smoke, and
burning embers as they also escaped arrest and ICE detention. Everyone here
is hungry and tired.
A speaker from a newly formed California Homeless Union takes the stage.
He describes one of the Union’s leaders, a woman who fled her abuser. She had
concluded that it was safer to move herself and her young children into an open-
air tent city rather than endure domestic violence at home. The Union’s speaker
shows us photographs of the woman’s town: blue tents sagging in the rain. The
city had placed restrictions on the tents, permitting them only along the sides
of a major road. In one photo, a big rig truck squeezes through. Its chrome rims
spin a hairsbreadth from the tarps. I am looking at the photograph and thinking
of the woman, who fled a violent man and found sanctuary for herself and her
children in a wet tent by the road. I am thinking about how tiny hands can be
made safe while lying within flattening distance of truck tires. I am thinking
of that road, paved for commerce, with people eking out an existence on either
side. I am measuring the impossibly slim space for human error and exhaustion:
tight as a breath and lean as a finger. I sit in this church in Greensboro and begin
to write a poem.
Urban theory is often distilled through poetry. Marshall Berman famously
drew on the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1970) to discuss the divided possi-
bilities of modernity (Berman 1983). In ‘The Eyes of the Poor,’ Baudelaire (1970)
describes the experience of new urban space from multiple people’s perspec-
tives: those awestruck by its beauty and grandeur, those made jaded and cruel
by its opulence, those enraged by their own violent exclusions from it, and those
disconcerted by all these divides. To grasp and confront these contradictions,
wrote Berman, is ‘to make oneself somehow at home in this maelstrom.’ Poetry,
perhaps, becomes essential for urban theorists and activists because it recog-
nizes conditions that are widely felt but remain inexpressible through available
categories. The ambiguity can be instructive. The objective of poetic language is
not to pin down meaning, but rather as Toni Morrison once wrote, ‘its force, its
felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.’ (Morrison 1995)
In 1972, Adrienne Rich wrote these lines about New York in her poem
‘Merced.’ They remain my favorite description of what the onset of neoliberal-
ism might have felt like in the period before it had a name:

‘Taking off in a plane

I look down at the city
which meant life to me, not death
and think that somewhere there
a cold center, composed
of human beings
metabolized, restructured
by a process they do not feel

2
 Heatherton: Freighted Love: teaching, learning, and making a home in the maelstrom

is spreading in our midst

and taking over our minds
a thing that feels neither guilt
nor rage: that is unable
to hate, therefore to love.’ (Rich 1973)

Sitting in a church, I try to give name to a shared sense of suffocation and des-
peration – the breathless need for escape as well as the hazy vestiges of security
that seem to disappear upon arrival. I also want to capture the power of this
assembly, this unwieldy congregation of people looking up from despair, all try-
ing to find a way out together. They give me hope.
The ‘makers of wealth are invisible in America’ writes Sterling D. Plumpp,
in the untitled poem that opens geographer Clyde Woods’ Development Arrested:
The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (1998), ‘I excavate with
songs.’ The book outlines Woods’ concept of blues epistemology, a philosophi-
cal system of explanation developed by the Black working class and excavated
through song, poetry, art, and culture. Blues epistemology is counter-posed to the
intellectual traditions of the capitalist plantocracy and its ‘lovingly cultivated
theoretical blindness.’ This blindness, Woods explains, is not only perpetuated
by the beneficiaries of racism and capitalism, but by those who feel power-
less against them and choose instead to, ‘accept them, intensify them, rub them
raw and preserve them in all their horrid splendor.’ The Blues, for Woods, offers
another way of knowing.
A decade ago, Clyde Woods encouraged Jordan T. Camp and me to write
about housing struggles. He was a contributor to our first edited volume
Downtown Blues: A Skid Row Reader (2011), a collection by scholars, artists, and
organizers opposing the racist policing, gentrification, and the redevelopment
of Skid Row, Los Angeles. He supported us as we continued our work with a
second reader, Freedom Now! Struggles for the Human Right to Housing in LA and
Beyond (2012), which we dedicated to him after his untimely death. Where none
existed, Woods made a place in the academy that defied the easy seductions of
hopelessness and shallow opportunism of idealism. In a poignant 2002 article
called ‘Life After Death’ he outlined his challenge for scholars, asking, ‘Have we
become academic coroners? Have the tools of theory, method, instruction, and
social responsibility become so rusted that they can only be used for autopsies?
Does our research in any way reflect the experiences, viewpoints, and needs
of the residents of these dying communities? On the other hand, is the patient
really dead? What role are scholars playing in this social triage?’ (Woods 2002)
In the spirit of his questions, I offer a few of my own: How can we under-
stand the ineffable condition of cities now? How do we teach and learn under
such brutal conditions? How might we find a way out together? How will we
make our home in this ongoing maelstrom?
I offer the following three poems, inspired by Clyde Woods and by that
meeting in a Greensboro church, by way of answers.

3
City

Freighted Love Four walls and one

The patter of rain
I’ve been out in the world against windows
with words and
I know their meanings the heavy downpour
Their many meanings: beating overhead
grope: to reach around blindly upon a tent
grope: to grab with menacing intent
Love allows you
A smile too to see a doctor
means more Unloved you
when it doubles smoke a cigarette
as a request and hope
for love and/or it’ll go away
health insurance on its own

Love here Freighted,

subsidizes rent Love coaxes
Love supports flirtatious laughs
where stolen pensions can’t from stricken throats
Love guarantees Love excuses
elder care violet bruises
childcare from minor tyrants
the heat, the roof, the water bills Love
Love fills in Freighted love
for cut bus lines and phones makes us fools
You can tell in desperate times
how loved a person is
by their teeth love:
to grope innocently
Love- for affection
was it ever meant to carry love:
all this abandoned weight? to grab menacingly
for your own life
Love is the difference — Christina Heatherton
between a home and a couch

4
 Heatherton: Freighted Love: teaching, learning, and making a home in the maelstrom

Pedagogy In this city of empty homes,

untrod carpets,
Last night a woman and untouched walls,
died in the park by the school. where apartment blocks
The coroner will say heave with stale air
she died from exposure. and speculative value,
Snow fell from her hair a woman died in the middle
and melted where his feet stood of a riddle.
examining the body—
his shoe briefly slid But I am here to teach you
on the puddle. analytical skills
and not riddles
Last night a woman died what will be on the test
for want of a house. and what will count for extra credit
Who knew a park bench Here I will teach you
could be so cold? that your lives are different than hers
Today in a classroom full of pink that you will always be protected
cheeks that you will never be forgotten
and cradled coffees,
so toasty the windows cloud I am here to teach you
with exhalations, the first rules of war:
we will not speak
of such things. that the dead
have no names
Last night
adjacent to the school that the living enjoy
in a reality adjacent to our own rich lives of
a woman living an adjacent life bleak indifference
–parallel and not bisecting–
faced a death so cold that no one here
and so lonely will ever
only the stars apologize
would speak — Christina Heatherton
her name.

5
City

Invasions

To be young
broke
and beautiful
is to be
a small country
with a major
port city:
No one believes
you belong
to yourself
and no one will ever
leave you alone
— Christina Heatherton

Disclosure statement Woods, Clyde. 1998. Development Arrested: The

Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi
No potential conflict of interest was reported Delta. London: Verso.
by the author(s). Woods, Clyde. 2002. “Life After Death.” The
Professional Geographer 54 (1): 62–66.
References
Baudelaire, Charles. 1970. Paris Spleen, 1869.
Translated by Louise Varèse. New York: Christina Heatherton is an Assistant
New Directions. Professor of American Studies at Barnard
Berman, Marshall. 1983. All That is Solid Melts College, Columbia University. She is the
Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. co-editor with Jordan T. Camp of Policing
London: Verso. the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black
Camp, Jordan T., and Christina Heatherton. Lives Matter (Verso, 2016) and is currently
2012. Freedom Now! Struggles for the Human completing Making Internationalism: The
Right to Housing in LA and Beyond. Los Color Line, the Class Struggle, and the Mexican
Angeles: Freedom Now Books. Revolution (University of California Press).
Heatherton, Christina, ed. 2011. Downtown She co-directs multiple public-facing initia-
Blues: A Skid Row Reader. Los Angeles: tives including the Racial Capitalism Working
Freedom Now Books. Group through the Center for the Study
Morrison, Toni. 1995. “Nobel Lecture, 7 December of Social Difference, Columbia University.
1993.” Georgia Review 49 (1): 318–323. Email: [email protected]
Rich, Adrienne. 1973. Diving Into the Wreck:
Poems 1971–1972. New York: W.W. Norton
& Company.