Not Leaving
On the politics of staying in the hope of something better
I graduated in the spring of 2020 from Barnard College of Columbia University with a dual B.A. in English and Human Rights, with a concentration in Creative Writing. The work that made up my three thesis papers existed at the intersection of contemporary rural Southern identity, the power—and burden—in sharing one’s story, and the complications of artistry under a capitalist system, dating all the way back to turn-of-the-century England. At Columbia, I learned most of these things abstractly, sitting around wooden tables in beautiful, hallowed halls. It was always easier to discuss decolonization, democracy, and divestment in theory, and the breach between these discussions and what was genuinely being practiced by the systems in place began to make me feel as if I was stuck in an alternate universe. Why teach us about authors such as Edward Said and Frantz Fanon if we weren’t meant to learn from their ideas and put them into practice? Beyond that, the gap between my own lived experiences and the stereotypes placed upon them by professors and peers was exhausting. I had mentors who told me it was my “duty” to come home and write about the South, peers who told me my work read like “Hillbilly Elegy written by an actual writer” as if that was a compliment. I never agreed with this idea that because I understood something about a place, it was my burden to go back and tell about it—nor did I ever necessarily think that I was the right person to do so. My family might have come from rural roots, but I had graduated from a wealthy private school in Charleston, South Carolina—not exactly from the backwoods. I remember trying to explain this to people, but they seemed to have no imagination that art, wealth, and culture could exist at the same level in a place like South Carolina, and eventually I stopped trying to explain at all.
I graduated college from my dining room table in Charleston, on a twenty minute Zoom call where they did not read our names because they promised there would be a real ceremony later. There was, I hear, two years later, which I did not attend because I could not get off work at my teaching job in North Carolina, and also because I did not have particularly fond memories of college. New York City, and Columbia in particular, made me feel incredibly isolated and sad and hopeless and I left because I did not want to feel that way anymore. I wanted to root in community—to even find community at all—and to give equal parts of myself over to what I would gain by being in community. I can say now that moving to a small town in North Carolina where I knew no one, to an apartment I signed a lease on without even seeing, all during the height of a global pandemic, was easily the best thing that ever happened for my life, but it didn’t always feel that way. The community I have gained here came from a willingness to root in place, to remain open to new connections, and to be in constant search of those who share a common vision for the contemporary South—a love that has emerged often out of deep hatred for this place we all now call home.
If you’ve been following the news this week, then you will have seen Columbia and Barnard popping up across headlines. There’s lots to say about the situation, but I want here to focus on how inspired I have felt watching people commit to a place and want to see it be better. I came across the above tweet a few days ago, and it resonated deeply with me; this is so often how I feel about working in a Southern space and what I find myself often trying to explain to those elsewhere who ask me about the impetus to do this work here. There is power in choosing to care about something, to not want to leave it behind. There is power in the refusal to accept that the way things are is the way they must be, and to hold the systems and institutions that are meant to protect us accountable. On that, this is a great op-ed by Barnard alums and current Columbia Professors Edwidge Danticat and Jhumpa Lahiri; on the suspension of Barnard students participating in protests, they write: “They are also being punished for their refusal to be silent —just as generations of women, throughout centuries, have been told to keep quiet. This runs directly against everything Barnard stands for, or used to stand for.” Yes.
There is power, as well, in choosing to do this work up close. When I was in New York, I felt so far away from the communities I called home; it felt impossible to write about contemporary Appalachia when I was states away from my family. I feel this duality now, watching snippets of my former campus in videos shared to social media. How strange to witness a place you know intimately in the rearview; how privileged to understand that it is this time and distance that allows me to hold a B.A. from an Ivy League institution while my peers risk suspension, eviction, and arrest. I am not always proud to say I am alum of this institution, but I am proud to stand alongside the student body, who are the true core of this community and who are demonstrating in real time what communal solidarity looks like. In collectivity we grow a movement. This is one of the core things we discuss in the podcast, but also a guiding principle for myself and my broader approach to creative and academic work.
I am thinking as well of this power in rooting in the recent controversy around Lauren Oyler, and in particular, this interview she did with Interview Mag, where she rags on West Virginia multiple times, and says outlandish things like the following:
I don’t hold any personal hatred for Oyler; in fact, I see a lot of myself in her, both writers who grew up in proximity to rurality and left it for the Ivy League. According to others in West Virginia, Oyler grew up in a relatively-wealthy suburb of Charleston, the state capital—as I did growing up in a suburb of the other Charleston, in South Carolina. My issue here is with her descriptions of Appalachia and with the interviewer, who seems to have no questions at all in response to this claim. I’ve loved the takes from West Virginians on this interview, which follow the lines of we don’t drive the bookmobile up the holler for you to say this kind of shit, and which counter the narrative that just being from West Virginia at all makes you backwards and unintelligent. Anyone who claims they got into Yale without reading a book—even if they are being facetious—should be questioned. To be able to move an interview forward without a single pause at that kind of statement speaks to our larger cultural failures in accurately representing rural places.
Here is another bit of their conversation:
Look, I’m not going to say that everyone who is from a rural or Southern place needs to stay. I’ve already said that I disagree with the burden placed upon people to be the “voice of their community.” We don’t need a singular voice! We need a multiplicity of storytellers that show that rural places are not a monolith, that they are diverse and wide-ranging places of expression, resistance, and experience. It’s fine to not like where you are from! What is not fine is discounting the active and meaningful work being done by those who have chosen to return. You can escape into coastal elitism all you want and no one will stop you. But we should stop the narratives promoted by coastal elitism that there is nothing of value in any of these places. And as a side note, I don’t know any true rural communities with a 12-lane highway. I’m all for abolishing the American suburb (I’ve written about the hollowness of suburbia and its threat to rurality here), but let’s get clear on what we mean when we say rural. Corporate greed and politicians are ruining much of the rural American South, and especially Appalachia—on that I agree with Oyler. But I would also love to see this take where she recognizes the communities working to fight that corporate greed by rooting in place and collective power. This type of organizing happens not just in urban Ivy League schools, but also in Ohio and Nevada and here, in North Carolina. One of the first steps of solidarity is to check your bias at the door—even if it’s bias towards the place you know. I have learned so much from being open to caring about a place. I hold on to the common vision. I love this place even when I hate it and I will not turn my back on that. To truly care about something is to sit with that duality—to let it move you towards a space of transformation, and to believe that transformation is possible still.
“I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.”
— James Baldwin
Loving your words always. Hope you're living well, Spencer!