There There

by Tommy Orange

The wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has never healed. An unattended wound gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound like the history of what actually happened became a new kind history. All these stories that we haven’t been telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal. Not that we’re broken. And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given up, to have survived, is no badge of honor. Would you call an attempted murder victim resilient?

This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff.

If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last name. Follow it back and you might find your line paved with gold, or beset with traps.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. —JAMES BALDWIN

“So? We all fuck up. It’s how we come back from it that matters.”

“That’s the way this whole thing is set up,” she said. “You’re not ever supposed to know. Not all the way. That’s what makes the whole thing work the way it does. We can’t know. That’s what makes us keep going.”

“Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the earth….Nothing is original, everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing….Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.”