VERSO / volume 7 — February editorial
VERSO / vol. 7 is a new form of sharing art and culture. Each month we’ll curate contributions of writing, poetry and visual art packaged along with personalized editorials and deliver them monthly.
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Dear —
About a week ago I was standing in line at the pharmacy when a man, no mask, stood so close to me that I had to ask him to move. He became aggressive, calling me the usual Dutch slurs, so I took a picture of him in case I would need it. Then he coughed in my face and left.
When I came home in tears, my partner called the police. The police said I could press charges. Because of the timeline we’re in, coughing in someone’s face is now considered an aggravated assault. From what I can find online, that means a four-week prison sentence and a fine of several hundred euros.
When the police called me to file my report, it started with the usual questions. And then there were the other usual questions. You know the ones. I knew this would happen. I had tried to prepare myself for it.
Police: “Was he Dutch?”
Me: “What do you mean?” (of course I knew what she meant) Police: “Where did he come from?”
That thing where my lungs come up in my throat. “You mean was he white. You’re asking me if he’s white or not. You’re asking me if he’s like 17th century Dutch or not.”
Police: “Was he Arabic?”
Me: “Was he Arabic? What?”
Police: “Would people think he’s maybe from Morocco?”
When I got off the phone, I broke down in tears.
Filing a report against this man means putting him in eyeshot of a system stacked against him,
at every level, starting here, at this, the report, starting here with its syntax and semantics. Filing a report against this man also means standing up to his hostility towards me, a gay woman. Of course, I don’t know if my being gay (or a woman, for that matter) had anything to do with his behavior, but I’m under no delusions either. I look gay. I know this. Lots of things in the world remind me of this often.
He looks X, I look X. He was agro, I took his picture. When we wait in line now we wait on stickers telling us where to stand. We give each other side-eye when we don’t follow the rules. We are blowing up at home, on the street, in stores. We are all having panic attacks. If I file this report, and they find him, he will go to jail.
VERSO / vol. 7 - February 2021
There’s a reclamation happening in both of this month’s pieces, a reclamation that I am trying to meditate on (I am not very good at meditating), maybe better said spend time with, not only as an editor, but as a woman, queer, and mother who recently experienced what I experienced. This reclamation is outside of or exceptional to any system that may otherwise try to control it. Rabi Bah’s “Space to Be”, a hand suspended and disjoined, is also a hand emerging—bringing itself into the expanse that it now claims. Its grasp is tactile. It is commanding, and in that it is building a perimeter in which it can, in its entirety, be. Ama Codjoe’s poem “She Said” offers us similar discernable senses, “the space between she and said the ears in years the saying the said between.” Testimony from cases, at least one of which many of us will recognize, designed as a booklet for you here using tropes of the paperwork of litigation: Century Schoolbook, a font often chosen for legal briefs; the prong fastener common to filing systems. In “She Said”, Codjoe makes sure we look at this testimony by looking at the spaces between it. And to look at it again. And that is exactly what both of these pieces are doing, at least as I read them. They call us to what is missing, but more so they call on us to participate in putting the missing back.
At the time of writing this letter to you, I have not yet filed a report. I’m grappling two conflicting exertions: between a feminist, queer-positive selfhood that deserves and demands safety, and an abolitionist, anti-racist ethics that envisions justice beyond the walls of penal code. I believe in and try to live by all of the above, and right now, in this moment for me, they seem to be in opposition. If I could have a conversation with him now, would I? What does restorative justice look like in the every day? Could it ever even be systematized? Why didn’t I say something to him then, when I had the chance? Why did the bystanders just...stand by? Has covid made our personal spaces thicker? Made us exempt from getting involved? From reaching out? Are we afraid to get too close? Where does this leave us as a community, our comfort zones gone?
Part of the answer seems to be here, in these works by Rabi and Ama. And that we must move forward, in space, trying to do less harm.
With love,
Megan M. Garr