Hearth: A Global Conversation on Identity, Community, and Place - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 157131380X ISBN 13: 9781571313805

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 2019

Synopsis

A multicultural anthology, edited by Susan O’Connor and Annick Smith, about the enduring importance and shifting associations of the hearth in our world.

A hearth is many things: a place for solitude; a source of identity; something we make and share with others; a history of ourselves and our homes. It is the fixed center we return to. It is just as intrinsically portable. It is, in short, the perfect metaphor for what we seek in these complex and contradictory times―set in flux by climate change, mass immigration, the refugee crisis, and the dislocating effects of technology.

Featuring original contributions from some of our most cherished voices―including Terry Tempest Williams, Bill McKibben, Pico Iyer, Natasha Trethewey, and Chigozie Obioma―Hearth suggests that empathy and storytelling hold the power to unite us when we have wandered alone for too long. This is an essential anthology that challenges us to redefine home and hearth: as a place to welcome strangers, to be generous, to care for the world beyond one’s own experience.

About this title

About the Author:

Annick Smith is the author of several books, including Homestead, In This We Are Native, Big Bluestem, and most recently Crossing the Plains with Bruno. She produced the prize-winning feature Heartland, and was a founding board member of Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute. Her travel and nature writing, short stories, and essays have appeared in journals such as Audubon, Outside, Islands, Travel + Leisure, Orion, the New York Times, Story, and National Geographic Traveler and have been widely anthologized. She was also the editor of Headwaters: Montana Writers on Water & Wilderness, and coeditor with Susan O’Connor of The Wide Open: Prose, Poetry, and Photographs of the Prairie. She lives in Bonner, Montana. Susan O’Connor is an environmental and arts advocate. She has served on the boards of several art museums, including the Menil in Houston, Texas. She has also been a board member of the Orion Society and the American Prairie Reserve. She cofounded several nonprofits, including Pacific Writers Connection, Ala Kukui: Hana Retreat, Ohana Makamae, and Families First both in Boston and Missoula. She was coeditor with Annick Smith of The Wide Open: Prose, Poetry, and Photographs of the Prairie. She lives in Missoula, Montana.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Heaarth
Bill McKibben

Living in the north, in the woods, I've of course spent much of my life in front of an actual hearth, or at least a woodstove. For decades it was the main way of heating our house and my body clock reset to the point where I'd wake at three in the morning to stoke the fire as easily as a mother to nurse. Every night from October to April finds us in the few dozen square feet in front of the stove, our house collapsed into that narrow envelope of warmth. The dog can sit for hours looking into the flames: the "fire channel," we call it.

But honesty requires me to say that in recent years we haven't really inhabited that space. We've been there physically, but we've been staring into the small and portable hearths resting on our laps, staring into the mesmerizing blaze of light that now enthralls people everywhere. Enthralls them, or at least my wife and me, more powerfully than the TV ever did. Television we happily did without―its din and clamor easily enough forgotten the minute you stepped away. But this? Not so easily avoided.

To say that the Internet―something that did not really exist till my life was half over―is now where many of our lives are lived is almost an understatement. Twitter is the center of our political life, Facebook the replacement for the newspaper and the newscast, and Amazon where we go to shop. Spotify offers a catalogue of every vaguely musical sound emitted everywhere on earth, yours for ten dollars monthly; Wikipedia delivers a roughly reliable guide to our collective knowledge. I've spent the last decade helping organize a global grassroots movement to fight climate change, and we literally could not have done it before the Internet. We live in a nation governed now by someone who could not have been elected before the Internet's advent. But no need here to tally all the Internet's terrors. Suffice it to say that the Internet is now our collective hearth, the place where our species addictively turns. We tilt toward the screen the way plants twist toward the sun. Orthopedists report that our characteristic posture has shifted from all that staring downward, bringing us new aches and pains. If we were the ape that walked upright, we're now the ape that looks at its palm most of the time.

So let us think not about the manifestations good and bad of this technology but instead about the basic nature of this new world we inhabit, and compare it to the hearth around which we've gathered since the start of things.

Life on the Internet means two opposing realities. One, the bedrock solipsism of the experience. This is for you, and you only. You follow your own series of clicks down your own warren of trails, a path no one else will ever follow exactly. You've shaped your own feeds to reflect your own beliefs and persuasions, and hence they now reflect that back at you. Even the TV was a river with relatively few channels―three, in my youth. There was unavoidable sharing and overlap. But the Internet is a delta with endless braided rivulets and streams. You are by yourself.

And yet you are also never alone, never unoccupied. The clicking never ceases―I follow nine hundred people on Twitter, which means that never more than a few seconds elapses before some new idea pops up on the screen. One never reaches Facebook only to find a notice saying "nothing interesting has happened." There's always more. And our brains seem to crave that endless flow of novelty―not looking at the unread e-mail in your inbox is at least as hard as not eating from the opened box of chocolates in the pantry. Stimulus, reward, dopamine, something something―that's how it seems to work.

My fear is that we're losing―that I'm losing―the two crucial things the hearth, or the campfire before it, provided. The first is commonality, the shared community built by the gathering of several souls in the same place. Think about the creation stories passed down by millennia of oral repetition. Or think of the gossip exchanged nightly. Both served to ground us in particular communities, instead of the literal nowhere we now spend our time. There's still plenty of gossip, but it's about worlds we don't actually inhabit. We are truly by ourselves, and for a socially evolved primate that is a strange experience; it wasn't that many generations ago that we were sitting on the warm savanna grass and picking lice out of each other's fur. The closest we've got now is the moment when something goes viral, and for a moment there's a connection between us, until the next click kills it.

But at the same time, we're never alone. At night, when the fire dwindled, the talk did too. People drifted toward sleep, or into their thoughts. Throughout human history, one of the characteristic experiences of Homo sapiens has been to stare into the dying embers, one's mind wandering. But that, I think, rarely happens anymore. There's something to fill every moment, something new and different even if it's essentially the same.

All this is a way of saying: thinking consciously about the hearth―about those places and activities that center us in community and also in our own minds―is now crucial in a way it's never been before. I miss, a great deal, those experiences that have always marked our lives, and there are times when I feel as if I'm living inside an experiment, an experiment going wrong. That's why this book is important. If we're to keep the chain of deep human contact intact, we need to actively seek out those experiences. For most of human history, rattling on about community and about focus would have been like having a considered opinion on breathing, or offering advice on bipedal locomotion. But all of a sudden our default is in the opposite direction. The Internet, whatever its other vices and virtues, is an anti-hearth, and it is winning. Where our time is spent, there also is our heart.

***

Codex Hogar
Luis Alberto Urrea

"Why should love stop at the border?"
―Pablo Casals

Uno.

You'd think
a desert teemed with heat, churned
volcanic with dusted daylong baking: precious
little warmth beneath the pyramid of night those hard
Christmas eves: we gathered before a kerosene heater burning
within its glass tower, blanketed and huddled on bare floors with the dogs
in chemical smell not at all like pine boughs: and aunts who did not decorate trees,
exhausted from long days working American bowling alleys, American tuna canneries, smoking
and giving us American gifts that my father would not allow: a teddy bear was not a gift for a Mexican
boy―and my aunt taking it back and giving me instead a cheap plastic pinball game I did not want, but
received in a stoic fashion though years later, all of them dead, I wish I had that ridiculous Woolworth's
bear
to remember
anything soft
from that world
before the walls
loomed
over us.

*

Dos.

Your house might have perched on the side of a hill
miles south of the border, whatever that was. Somewhere
up there by the riverbed. Past the sidewalks where spray-
painted donkeys played the roles of zebras
for beer-drinking Americans calling everyone "Pancho"
and "Mamacita." You could have been a child
who thought wonderful things: that Americans were
always drunk and were the ones who wore big sombreros,
that zebras came from Mexico. You might have been a skinny
girl whose name meant "Daisy" in translation. A girl who lived
in that house perched on that hill, where the neighbors had
outhouses and tuberculosis, but a girl whose roof looked out
across a small canyon to the city and its dusty trees
with whitewashed trunks and gazebos with old men too fat
to button their uniforms and too slack to blow their
trumpets well, but their bleating as sour as tamarind juice
was somehow beautiful with the sounds of old buses and
police whistles and the ten thousand insouciant
street dogs barking at children playing soccer in the park.
You might even have had that girl's mysterious power
to hold out her fingers and attract wild birds
to tumble from the sky and grip her knuckles as if
they were her feathery rings. And you might have seen
when the family went to a rare restaurant meal together
the poor people from some dark South begging on the street
called Revolution. Seen how all modern nations only love
dead Indians and make for their ghosts tales of noble mystics
who are played in films by handsome Italians and Mexico City
rich kids in spray tans and $5,000 wigs, but send machine cavalries
after their living children: four-wheel drive Hemi horses
chasing Aztecs and Mayas and harrowing them to pens
in Wonderland. You might have walked beside my cousin
with her birdy fingers, and my aunt, after that plastic American
Christmas, smoking her Newports like a power station burning
cheap sulfury coal, already seeding the cancer in herself,
and the living India standing outside the chicken diner as beautiful
as anyone I had ever seen. Seeking alms like a gospel sojourner.
Almost black, she was--braids brilliant in that winter sun, rebozo
over her shoulder and slinging her dark child at long breast,
suckling in the long smoky crèche of the avenue―
and my aunt suddenly turning on her
and kicking her
and shouting,
"Dog!
Get away from us!"
You might have felt the world,
like we children did, spin away and become something
made of iron
and bullets.

*

Tres.

You'd think a desert
would be hot. But
away from sight
there were beds
made of paper
in boxes of cardboard
on hilltops of wraiths
and ghost walkers
where gulls haunted
the sleep of dogs
too old and sick
to run the streets
where trucks
dropped all the
broken things
both countries
threw at the border
like toys like boots
like plastic chairs
like cans of peaches
like televisions like
laptops like tables
like porn magazines
like Bibles like rotten
fish like run-over cats
like rabid raccoons like
worn-out zebras like
canisters of blood
from abortion clinics
like underwear like
burning horses
and Indians
from impossible lands
where it stayed hot
but trucks came
at any hour
and the sound of engines
meant dying time
had come 'round again
and there was nothing left
to eat
those Indians
slept on plastic
spread over mud
in their boxes
and blessed America
for the old blankets
born-again conquistadors
dropped from above
and their babies
coughed in the night
because they had never
felt such cold
as they found in the shadow
of the Great Wall
coughed until blood
fell from their lips
fell like beads
from some ancient raiment
and I know
because I was there
the year fourteen
of these small ones
died
on Christmas Eve
on a hill
where their mothers
could watch
the lights of California
where it was always warm
and where kings in golden planes
moved around the brilliant
hive like
magnificent
wasps.

*

Hearthland

I have often and long written about the borderlands. Having been born and bred there, I consider myself as somewhat of an expert. Though no place on this earth reveals all its history and wonders to any observer, it does help to have lived there. And it gives any writer a great place to stand, that old dirt and shadow. It has been my experience, especially in the age of the Trumpion, that there is a shocking freakishness to the Mexican, Mexican-American, and borderlands narrative. New York editors, for example, need to be reminded that we are actually human beings. Washington politicians need to be reminded that we might actually love something south of the Great Wall.

I have said before, and I will say again, that Tijuana was a wonderland for me. I didn't know we were not well-off. (I won't honor our struggles with the word poor. Anyone who has read my early works will know all about real poverty.) I did nearly die of tuberculosis. And you could not drink the water. However, Tijuana was where the music was, and the dogs, and the food, and the colors, and that sacred summoning of spirits called Spanish. All the stories were there. All my ancestors.

There came Biblical failures of Eden, as they always do. Mine were twofold, and I tried to meld them in this poem. The first was my first encounters with the meek who shall inherit the earth. The invisible poor―invisible because we would not look at them. So the day I saw my beloved aunt kick an Indigenous beggar, I knew two things profoundly―yea, three things did I see. One: I was with that poor woman and loyal to her forever. Two: I was with the Indigenous people, whoever they were, and knew I would learn who they were. And the third lesson was witness. I would never look away. Selah.

The other lesson that the recent toxic election reminds me to suffer over and over, with women and Latina/os and Black citizens and people of good heart and will, was that once I came to the United States (my mother was American, so this, too, was home), I was suddenly called things I had never heard of. Greaser, wetback, pepper-belly, beaner, taco-bender. I learned that we were not human. We were Other. Because of some line that a commission decided to etch on some map (not smart enough to draw the boundary a few miles south so they could steal the mouth of the Colorado River and the top of the Sea of Cortez, thus costing the United States a potential powerhouse port system and utter control of the river). And this mythos of wall-building was just more calling of names. Names in brick and mortar and wire and steel. And thus, my fourth lesson in home: I am and will be Other. Until I write you into my heart and make you see my home as what it is. Just another extension of your own home. For there is no them; there is only us.

***

We Will Wait for You
Chigozie Obioma

Dim, since you left,
we have been waiting for you.
We've lived here for long,
so long the thatch has turned gray,
―for we have been waiting for you.

I am not waiting alone.
Your father, Yee Emeka, sits on his stool outside his obi every day, waiting.
Da Ndali, your mother, crouches beside the hearth on which she cooks, waiting.
Ikenna, your son, crawls about killing ants with his hands, waiting.
And I, the woman on whose breasts you slept every night, lie here
―waiting for you.

Our people say that a goat cannot lose its voice to bleating.
Although it has been long, my strength is being weakened
by the violent fear that ravages me every night,
leaving me naked as the horn of a cow.
Because it is what you asked me to do,
―I keep waiting for you.

Last week the wind blew the frightful braying dust toward our house
and I knew that the harmattan had arrived, the third since you left.
Night has begun to fall earlier again.
This, too, is the third of such changes.
Even now from my cooking hearth, I see that the moon
has become an angry eye peering down at the hills of Nta,
for perhaps the thousandth time since you left.
When it darkens more, the way it now does,
bleachless, visceral gloom, and I lie down in our hut to sleep,
perhaps my dreams will again be peopled by strange men.
But when I wake up at cockcrow, and the hymen of darkness is torn,
―I will continue to wait for you.

But then, strange things beg...

About this edition

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 157131380X
• ISBN 13: 9781571313805
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280
• Editor: Smith Annick, O’Connor Susan