MOBILE SANCTUARY PROJECT

I have found that, as important as a straight-prose analysis of homelessness is, pure rationality fails to do justice to the complexity of the Zarim experience. As with any affair of the heart, the tools and techniques of poetry and art are better equipped to communicate such intricate and complex layers and angles. For this reason I have produced a handful of creative pieces, rooted in my own personal experiences, that attempt to paint a more 3-dimensional picture of homelessness. I call this series “Gonzo Academia” because, like Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo Journalism, each piece merges intellectual exploration with creative expression and makes no bones about blurring the lines between subjectivity and objectivity.

This piece, called Madness in the Matrix: Electroshock in a time of Genocide, explores how the ripples of trauma from generations past have impacted my family.

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I woke up not long ago and heard the words “light a candle for me” whispered in the wind as the leaves outside my bedroom window rustled. It was not clear to me for whom the candle should be lit, or why. As I emerged from my morning fog the hazy apparitions of some lost loved ones appeared before me one by one. 

First, I saw my brother, Jesse, three years my senior. His thick brown hair was short and coarse like straw. His naturally dark skin had leathered from the years on the streets, and his defeated brown eyes stared at me with with shame and disappointment. I have not seen my brother in nearly a decade, and his whereabouts have been unknown for years despite my attempts to track him down. For most of his adult life he has suffered my mother’s fate…lost, deeply wounded, marginalized…and has known mainly subway grates, homeless shelters, and prison cells since graduating from college over three decades ago. That he might be dead would not be the least bit surprising, as hard as it might be for me to accept. 

“Are you thinking of me, brother?” he asked longingly in his usual guttural slur. I grabbed my broom and began compulsively sweeping the crumbs on my kitchen floor into a pile. 

“Always, brother. Always.”

Next, I saw my mother, barefoot in a floral skirt, sitting underneath the tree in Washington Square Park where I had spread her ashes. Her hand shook as she took a deep drag on a cigarette.

My mother had died twice in my lifetime. The charismatic woman to whom I was born, with jet black hair, porcelain skin, and emerald eyes, in a cataclysmic blink twisted into a wretched writhing knot of grief and terror, barely six years into my nascent childhood. This woman I knew and loved beyond description morphed from goddess to rabid street dog right before my helpless eyes. This death, the death of her nature, was never mourned. It felt morbid, even in some way forbidden, to grieve someone while they still breathed and walked the earth, no matter how little they resembled themselves. However alive she may have been, she was clearly gone and gone forever. Though I cried many nights for many years, I never said goodbye to the woman with emerald eyes.

Her second death, the death of her body, came decades later. There was a service with shell-shocked loved ones, and there were ashes spread with prayers and tears, around that tree in Washington Square Park. And it all felt like pantomime, the empty gestures of a hollowed out ritual. There was not a narrative of a full life to celebrate, nor even threads of a painful story that we could somehow weave into meaning. There was just the shrapnel of a life detonated by some mysterious dark force, and the horror of those knocked on our asses in the wake. 

“Light a candle for me,” whispered the wind once again.

Another apparition appeared before me then, one not of family or friend. I recognized her, though, quite clearly, from the contrast between her coarse colorless garments and her cherubic innocent face. I recognized her, too, from the unforgettable look of shock and desperation in her ash gray eyes. Her name was Czeslawa Kwoka.

I learned about young Czeslawa, a 14 year-old Catholic girl from Poland, as I dove into the horrors of the Holocaust in my recent efforts to come to terms with what impact that inhuman hell had on me and my loved ones. I learned how she had been dragged from her home to Auschwitz where she was mercilessly persecuted and shortly thereafter died in captivity. As much as the sparse but harrowing details of her experience had gotten under my skin, it was the photos of her, taken by Auschwitz prisoner Willhelm Brasse, that really haunted me. I was touched and disturbed by the wavering flicker of her humanity that seeps through in Brasse’s powerful images of Czeslawa. I was unnerved by the line she straddles, in the haunting tryptic, between courage and catatonia. And I could not shake how present and personal she became to me, how the ungraspable magnitude of millions slaughtered became the unbearable tragedy of one helpless loved one. 

And through the eyes of young Czeslawa I began to see a window into the darkness that held my own family in its grasp. Reflected in those haunted eyes I began to see the same demon that took up captivity in my mother’s and brother’s soul and, truth be told, in mine too. I began to see that Czeslawa’s inhumanity was, and is, our inhumanity, her fear was, and is, our fear, and her helplessness was, and is, ours as well. 

I was struck by another photo in my research and reflections, in addition to the one of young Czeslawa. This one of a bloodied half-naked woman running in horror in the streets of Poland during one of the infamous pogroms as her young tormentors sadistically mock her. In addition to the obvious unfathomable cruelty, what caught my attention were the woman’s undergarments, which looked like the ones my grandmother hung on the clothe line that spanned the court yard of my childhood home in Spanish Harlem.

Details are scant regarding what my family witnessed as the waves of terror crashed around them in the Old Country. My grandmother told us one story repeatedly around the holidays, about how she had to grab my father and his brother and hide in their closet as the Nazis raided and pillaged the neighborhood where they lived in the Jewish ghettos of Vienna. She told us how the shrieks and cries of the hunted echoed through the streets, punctuated by gunshots and the shrill shatter of broken glass. She told us how they barely made it out alive, and many had not been so lucky. This was all she could say before welling up with tears and insisting we move on to another subject. 

“Light a candle for me,” whispered the wind once again.

The fissures in my mother’s psyche first manifested themselves, according to family lore, in her burgeoning adolescence. What appeared to be at first the usual angst of youth unfurled like the pedals of a dark flower into something more desperate and sinister, until she was nothing but unreachable agony. It was the 1950s, a time in America of grand cultural delusion and blind fundamentalist faith in industry and technology. Everything was sock hops and suburban utopia, where the sheen of polished chrome and the glow of cathode ray tubes blinded the populace to the shadows of oppression and genocide. There was no place, in this Truman Show, for despair, and no need for empathy. American ingenuity was all we needed to scrub the soul of its grime. The electrodes clamped against my mother’s temples would surely jump start her spirit back to the land of the living. 

It’s unlikely those electrodes asked her why she couldn’t stop crying. It’s just as unlikely that the cloistered men entrusted to tend to the broken in those days deigned to inquire either. It was, after all, well established that women were emotional, and uniquely emotional women were hysterical. What effect could kind words and compassion possibly have on a neurological condition? But a healthy jolt of juice in just the right place might do the trick.

Had the captains of industry invented a machine with a heart during that golden age of progress and innovation, my mother might have had the courage to reveal what ailed her. She may have shared that she had been crushed by her father’s death when she was a little girl, and deeply wounded by her mother’s inexplicable decision to send her and her sister away to boarding school on the heels of this tragedy. That machine might have as well coaxed out of my mom an epiphany, that her mother’s seemingly callous response was in actuality an act of desperation by a woman who herself bore the scars of childhood betrayal and persecution from having barely survived and escaped the Russian pogroms as a little girl, and had reached a near-breaking point by her husband’s sudden death.

I sat on the edge of my bed listening to the rustling leaves as evening came. I noticed a small black dot appear on the floor which began to slowly expand until touching the edges of the walls and the tips of my toes. I stared deeply into the hole but saw only darkness. 

And then the wind spoke again. 

“Light a candle now,” it said.

I saw first the face of young Czeslawa illuminated by the flickering light, but then I could see in the hole an ocean of souls. 

“These are the ones still waiting to be seen,” the wind said to me. 

“There were no loved ones left to honor them when they were taken from the earth. All who had known them, from closest relative to distant acquaintance, had perished in the slaughter. But there were witnesses who survived, those who heard the shrieks and the gunshots, those who saw the eyes of the terrorized as they ran helplessly and hopelessly for their lives, those who watched the slow desperate march of the living dead as their gaunt skeletal bodies were mercilessly prodded like cattle into ovens and gas chambers. 

Your relatives, the ones who survived, they heard those shrieks and cries, they witnessed the innocent being led like lambs to slaughter. But they are gone now, too, those relatives who bore witness. So now it is up to you. It is up to you to honor the dead, those who are still alive in you, in the suffering you bare from having loved those touched and burned by their memories from the Old World ghettos.” 

“It is up to you,” said the wind, “to see the unseen.”

I placed the candle on my window sill and quietly said a prayer. The hole closed, and night had fallen. It was time to sleep. 

…