After driving for a month, I was more than ready to begin the second leg of my journey–the one without a car–by July 29th. I was able to rest for about a day at home, do some much-needed laundry, and catch up with a couple of my favorite Spokanites before meeting with my friend Devon, who would be accompanying me to the first stop on the eastern leg, Detroit, MI. She was going to celebrate her birthday and her friends there, Kori and Christopher, were kind enough to host me as well for the five days I had planned there. I knew there were so many amazing projects going on in the city and had been exposed to a lot of the “renaissance” narrative around Detroit, but wanted to also look at the racial and economic aspects of that story and the ways that the framing of the collapse and partial rebuilding of the city has been white-centric despite its overwhelmingly black population’s ongoing work there. I also wanted to celebrate and explore with one of my dear friends and managed to accomplish both. We flew in through Salt Lake City and I remembered my short time there as I looked out the window and saw massive evaporation ponds. The ones I saw at first are actually not fracking related and are used to evaporate the salt and other minerals from Great Salt Lake, but I also glimpsed the smaller, but still huge, chemical evaporation ponds that I discussed with Donna Young from the vantage point of the plane.
Thanks to the preparation of our hosts, we were equipped with two guest bikes that happened to fit each of us (she almost a foot taller than me) quite nicely. We spent most of those days biking from our temporary home in New Center around the city checking out street art projects, cafes, and the other sights. I really relished being back where I belong, on a bike or on foot, after spending a month driving a car. On a bike, you can greet people around you, hear kids playing or getting scolded as you coast past, smell the scents–for better or worse–of the scenery you pass, feel the breeze cool you on a hot day, and just generally interact with your environment on a manageable scale. I’m glad we spent those first days in a way that helped me slowly re-enter a work pace after a short break and that they included a great deal of coffee and exercise. The first day, she got a flat tire and the second day, I did. Small bumps in the road, pun very much intended.
Kori, one of our hosts, works at a scattering of urban farms run by Greening of Detroit, an established non-profit that has, among other accomplishments, planted 85,000 trees in the city since 1989. She led us on a tour of that day’s site, the Detroit Market Garden, toward the end of her workday while a group of volunteers finished their work and we planted a row of parsnips before harvesting some produce for upcoming dinners. Detroit is among the best examples in this country for integrating local food infrastructure into the urban environment, as these photos show, while rebuilding access to healthy food that was largely destroyed in past decades leaving corner liquor stores as the only grocery option in many neighborhoods.
That night, we headed to Campus Martius Park to see a free show of Nick Cave’s incredible work titled “Here Hear“, part of a series of exhibitions and workshops in Detroit centered on his Soundsuits–wearable performance suits meant for dance and other expressive use. The otherworldly, colorful, and surrealistic suits look unbelievably cool in action and, particularly when they are topped with masks, make the dancers inside appear entirely alien. From the show description, some background on Cave’s work:
“Though influenced by a vibrant palette of African art, armor, found objects, fashion, and textile design, the origin of the Soundsuit is rooted in social critique. Cave first created a suit in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating in 1991, envisioning an emotional shield that protected one’s race or gender while still expressing individuality.”
That social critique is obviously even more potent today as evidenced by our country’s continued struggle to advance a conversation about race, gender, class and the often deadly outcomes of those assignations. The show was crowded, which is great news, but meant that I didn’t capture the best images. I highly suggest that people check out the gallery of this work for a better idea of what the project looks like.
Through the trip, we had quite a few great conversations about gentrification, racism, religion, that would be nearly impossible to summarize here. I can at least say that it was good to hear different perspectives on being white, moving to a historically (and currently) black city, and finding a way to be part of it without contributing to the white savior narrative that often dominates the media story on Detroit. When I interviewed Christopher and Billy, who with his wife owns the building we stayed in, they both shared the view that a person, regardless of who they are, should strive to be a good neighbor, and a good neighbor in every sense of the term–to adults, to children, to the built environment, and to the natural environment. I’ll post that interview here as soon as I get to editing it. We got to meet so many people in this community and, nearly as importantly, eat a lot of amazing food. These good neighbors are walking the talk.
On Saturday, we headed to the Sidewalk Festival of the Performing Arts, where performers of all kinds converged in the street and an adjacent warehouse space to present the best of regional dance, poetry, theater, and music in a dynamic shared place in the Old Redford and Brightmoor neighborhood. We arrived just in time to see Jessica Care Moore perform alongside Ursula Rucker and Wendel Patrick. Moore and Rucker discussed the roots of their collaboration and their desire to lift one another up as black female artists through collaboration rather than fall into the trap of women pitted against other women in competition and their genuine affection and respect for each other shone through in their performance. They opened with “Black Girl Juice”, a poem that Moore wrote at age 19 and which definitely holds up today as a self-love declaration popping with humor and power. The poem, “I Can’t Breathe”, though, dedicated originally to Eric Garner but that day also to Sandra Bland, was the showstopper. Just go ahead and take 7 minutes to watch this. The breathing into the mic at the end says as much as the words.
Most of the sound in other cell videos didn’t work out well, but I wish I could share Brinae Ali‘s performance with you here, too. She is a vocalist and tap dancer who performed a piece of a show that she created to help tell some of her life’s story. Accompanied by three other young female tap stars, she killed it and I was impressed by the sheer amount of energy it must take to tap dance your ass off, grab a mic, sing with all your heart, set it down and get back to dancing. I also enjoyed LaMarre and Dancers‘ collaboration with Erin Wilson & James Cornish. Set to an original composition played live, the modern troupe presented “Mechanical Response” a meditation on gun violence that was both haunting and incredibly technically demanding. We closed out our night with the final performance of the festival, Steffanie Christi’an, a self-proclaimed “rock goddess”, with one of the top live vocals I’ve ever seen. She is a true powerhouse with serious vocal chops, songwriting ability, and enough stage presence for multiple rock goddesses to split and still be considered good. The amalgamation of genres and communities in one space was electric and organic at the same time and allowed for people to flow through seeking what most interested them while exposing them to something entirely unexpected.
The next day, we biked more, glad to be getting back to some degree of health after a longish period of hedonistic neglect of exercise, and met up with Kori for a free yoga class offered weekly at the downtown farm, Lafayette Greens. Imani put us through the paces and had a great sense of humor while teaching. I am not a big time yoga practitioner, but I have to say it was one of the better experiences I have had and so interesting to be doing such an inner-focused practice in the middle of a city, ringed by sidewalks and buffered only by the garden beds and grass across which about 20 of us were spread. Yoganic Flow is one of a multitude of projects focusing on health and well being as a means of rebuilding a community from the individual level and I was glad to experience a little corner of that process.
We biked all the way to Belle Isle from there, an island park in the Detroit River, to eat burritos before sunset and take a quick swim. Belle Isle has been the site of recent controversy, kicked up by the management deal struck by the city with the state Department of Natural Resources. The management and use of the park have a long history that I won’t go into here, but it’s been both a site of racial tension and confrontation as well as a model for recreational integration depending upon the timeline and who you ask. That night, it was a great place to take a very picturesque, though a bit cold, river swim and dry off on the ride home.
That night, the last night I would spend in Detroit, we stayed up late enough to see an epic thunderstorm, complete with hail. I keep managing to find these serious storms, and am curious to see whether that pattern continues.
In the morning, I got to get down to a couple more interviews that I had been scheduling during the week. The first was with Peter Werbe, a former Praxis guest and editor of Fifth Estate magazine, which I have contributed to in the past. He is a lifelong Detroiter and we talked about the city, the state of the country, and the 50th anniversary of the magazine’s start in publishing. We talked about the metamorphosis of the magazine from one of hundreds of leftist publications springing up in the heydey of the 1960’s to the longest-running anarchist print publication around. We talked quite a bit about the moment that we’re living in now, which he compared to 1964–right before the iconic pot boiled over and sparked a serious upheaval in American culture. That interview is included in part in Praxis 143 and will be published in full here on the blog in the near future. I loved meeting Peter in person and he put me in touch with some great contacts for further along in my journey. He shared some of the details of the two separate retrospectives planned to celebrate Fifth Estate’s radical history–one at the Detroit Historical Society (opening Aug. 29) and one at MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit) as well and I am disappointed to not be able to return quickly enough to see them both.
Just before leaving town, I met up with Anthony Hatinger, garden production coordinator at Central Detroit Christian and Ted Kozerski, a forager and permaculturist who’s worked in farm-to-school with Detroit Public Schools. They were great to talk to about food justice, the challenges of growing food in contaminated city environments, education, and each of their personal reasons for being involved in the food system. I also got to experience the local food system in action as I showed up for the interview right as they finished barbecuing wild venison, local greens, squash and other veggies, and toasting up locally baked bread which they generously shared with me. They’re collaborating now on Detroit’s first insect farm and a host of other food projects, including the CDC Farm & Fishery built in an abandoned liquor store–a poetic reclamation of space in service of access to healthy food. Their interview is featured in Praxis 143 and will be posted in full as soon as possible here.
After my first visit to this complex and beautiful city, I have a longer list of people I’d like to talk with in the future. Here’s a few listed below who are doing great work in Detroit.
James & Grace Lee Boggs Center
I headed out and on to Toronto, hoping for better luck for the second part of my Canadian stay than I found in my first, and sad to see the Motor City go, but pretty sure that I’ll be back for more at some point. Click here for a photo gallery from this leg of the trip.
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