The Reckonings Read online

  In some translations, Philomela becomes a nightingale, doomed to sing her attacker’s name for all eternity: tereu, tereu. In others, her sister becomes the nightingale and Philomela is turned into a swallow, a bird that has no song at all.

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  Two things interest me about this story. The first is Philomela’s metamorphosis at the end, which is either justice or a further injustice, depending on your interpretation. The second, and more important, is her tapestry, an act of courageous speech that is not speech, this way of speaking out despite the impossibility of speaking. There is much to be learned from this.

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  Perhaps it is useful here to return to those famous lines by Muriel Rukeyser: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” It is a powerful image. But though I have turned to these lines often, I think what she is saying has proved only partially true. Many women have told the truth about their lives, however impossible that may seem at the time, and the world has gone on pretty much as before.

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  As you must have realized by now, the world does not shatter after I admit publicly to being kidnapped and raped. My mentors hug me, and offer kind words of praise and admiration. Yes, I have a few very awkward conversations in which it becomes clear that others find the subject of my rape a more uncomfortable topic than I do. I now realize this has little, if anything, to do with me and have stopped considering myself responsible for other people’s feelings about that. And though I felt compelled to protect my family all these years from the painful story I carried, my mother and I had the most honest conversation of our lives after she read my book. My husband, whose opinion matters to me more than that of any other person on this Earth, said if anything, he loved and admired me more. Though my fear was that this secret would come to define me as “that woman who got raped,” that I would be shamed, ostracized, shunned, what occurs with far more frequency is that a woman approaches me, soaking wet with her own tears. She says nothing, which communicates a story for which she has not yet found the words.

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  In the 1960s, Betty Friedan called domestic oppression “the problem that has no name.” We might now call the epidemic of sexual violence against women the problem that has no language.

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  If we are going to do the difficult work of grappling with these failures, it is not enough that we speak our truth to one another in private or behind closed doors, though this is an important and necessary step. I understand the fear of breaking a long-held silence. It is a fear that holds tremendous power. But if there is any hope for justice, we must speak truth to that power. We must tell anyone and everyone who will listen. And those who will not listen must be made to hear.

  WHAT WE PAY

  “Someone has to pay,” the woman in the white skirt tells my students. She’s sitting across from me, in a wonky circle we’ve made with the metal folding chairs we found stacked in a corner of the classroom. Her hands are on her thighs, and she’s leaning forward in her chair. She’s one of many guests I’ve invited to my class this week. In addition to my students, there are three environmental activists, and three activist artists, and, of course, the woman in the white skirt. I expected her to talk about her work as a community organizer, but she is instead talking about the BP oil spill, how BP has destroyed the lives and livelihoods of so many people all along the Gulf Coast. People have lost their jobs, their homes. Some have lost their lives.

  “BP won’t pay the claims but they have no trouble paying to make those stupid ads,” says the woman in the white skirt, standing up out of her chair. She raises her voice, points her finger, but I’m not sure at whom. My students watch, motionless in their chairs circled around her, maybe, like me, surprised to be feeling accused.

  One of the artists asks us to stand, to join the woman in the white skirt, to push our chairs toward the wall and out of the way. The artist asks us to imagine a spectrum of our relationship to the oil industry. “If your livelihood is very dependent on the oil industry, stand on this side,” the artist says. Then she gestures the other way. “And if your livelihood is not at all dependent on the oil industry, stand on that side.”

  Many of my students stand with the woman in the white skirt on that side, on the Not at All Side. I want to stand there too. But I remind my students that in Houston, everything is tied to the oil industry, even, and especially, art. The major renovation of the Museum of Fine Arts is funded by money from oil; most of the major collectors in town became rich from oil; even the person who donated money to the university to found the art center where I work made his fortune because he invented fracking.

  My students hang their heads as they shuffle toward me on this side, on the Very Dependent Side.

  * * *

  To be perfectly honest, before oil began washing up on our beaches, I’d never given it much thought. Years ago, when news that the Deepwater Horizon had exploded in the Gulf of Mexico reached us, my daughter, then only three, was home sick and I was newly pregnant with a second baby, nauseated by everything: my daughter’s illness, the smell of the sweat-dank blanket she insisted on lying under while watching hour after hour of Dora the Explorer, the dog hair in every crevice of the couch, the taste of my own breath. I sat in a chair across from my sick child and watched the footage of the oil gushing from the ocean floor on my laptop. I watched in total horror. But eventually I had to close my laptop and continue on with my day.

  Since then I’ve learned a lot about oil. It is a clear to tar-black mixture of hydrocarbons and comes in many forms: crude oil is subcategorized as heavy if it is very dense, light if it has low density, sweet if it is low in sulfur, or sour if the sulfur content is high. Light crude produces more gasoline, while sweet crude requires less refining and produces fewer environmental hazards. Bitumen, another form of oil, is associated with oil sands, tar sands, and natural asphalts. Shale is a fine-grained sedimentary rock from which petroleum can be extracted. Although the technology for doing this is relatively new, the word petroleum—Latin for “rock oil”—is quite old, appearing in 1546 in a work by German mineralogist Georg Bauer, who was the first to document the production, refining, and classification of the Earth’s “solidified juices.”

  Thankfully, our understanding of geology has improved in the last 470 years. We know now that petroleum, like other fossil fuels, dates from an unfathomably earlier period of Earth’s development—so much earlier that Earth might as well have been another planet, and, in fact, it was. When the world’s petroleum reservoirs were created, Earth was mostly swamp and vegetation, and the only land mass above water was the supercontinent of Pangea. Now, reservoirs have been found on every continent except Antarctica. The largest of these are in Venezuela, which recently surpassed Saudi Arabia as the holder of the largest-known oil reserves in the world.

  What I find fascinating is that these reservoirs were created almost entirely by chance, when dead organisms, mostly zooplankton and algae (not dead dinosaurs, as some would have us believe), collected on the seabed in vast quantities over tens of thousands of years, a relatively short period in Earth time. Slowly, layer upon layer of sediment accumulated on top of that rich layer of decaying organic matter, creating warmth and pressure that transformed it first into a waxy material known as kerogen and then, ever so slowly, into liquid and gaseous forms of hydrocarbon. This is not to say that all decayed prehistoric organic matter has been transformed into fossil fuels. On the contrary, the creation of the world’s reserves of petroleum all those ages ago was dependent on a perfect set of conditions: the layer of massive quantities of decaying organic matter needed layers and layers of rock at a sufficient depth to create enough pressure and heat to cook it for millions of years inside a reservoir rock porous and permeable enough to allow it to accumulate underneath a cap rock dense enough to trap it from escaping to the surface. The hydrocarbons collected by accident in these traps formed oil reservoirs, from which we
now extract petroleum very intentionally by drilling and pumping and flushing and squeezing, and a variety of other processes that can be completed only at great danger to the people executing them.

  The United States imports oil from these giant reserves—mostly from Venezuela, but also from Mexico, Canada, the Persian Gulf, and Nigeria—and it is pumped through giant pipelines thousands of miles long, or shipped on giant oil tankers across the ocean through the shallow waters of the Caribbean, into the Gulf of Mexico, navigating the eddies spiraling off the Gulf Loop current until it at last arrives at the Houston Ship Channel, where hydrocarbons are separated from one another by type and distilled from crude into any of the myriad forms petroleum can take: forms like fertilizers, dry cleaning chemicals, solvents and adhesives, pesticides, and plastics, which we use to make everything from our streetlights to our cooking utensils. The keys on which I am typing right now are plastic. We even use petroleum to make fabric. The pants I am wearing contain polyester, a man-made, petroleum-based fiber. Elastic is petroleum based, as is most of the ink we use to print our money. Crayons are made in part from paraffin, a derivative of petroleum. The PVC pipes carrying water through my house are made from petroleum. The wires bringing power from the wall to this laptop rely on petroleum-based coating for insulation. Even the so-called clean power generated by wind farms in West Texas require petroleum, since the turbines must be carried individually by enormous gas-guzzling tractor trailers before they are assembled as windmills across the state. Petroleum drives our politics, our society, our technology, and our economy. And the fact is: it has driven us mad with an insatiable thirst.

  * * *

  “Holy shit,” mumbles one of my students, crowded, like the others, around my laptop open on the desk in our unlit classroom. This week we’re watching the archived footage of the spill. They’re seeing it for the first time: oil gushes at the bottom of the ocean in rust-colored plumes. An eruption keeps erupting in a place that looks so unlike Earth it might as well be the surface of the moon. The camera pans out and out, then stops so suddenly the camera jars, wobbles: a loose precarious thing. Robot arms maneuver in and out of the plumes, sawing the riser pipe free, now falling out of the frame.

  Years ago, when the rig exploded 250 miles southeast of where we now sit, most of my students were still in high school, and, like most other high school students, they did not grasp the consequences of every story on the news. Now at twenty and twenty-one, they are bombarded each day with grim news about gentrification, terrorism, and climate change. They open their Facebook feed to stomach-churning video of a boy shot for carrying a toy gun on a playground, of girls gang-raped for getting drunk and being fifteen. The world they’ve inherited is not the one we promised them. We promised them the American Dream, the land of opportunity, a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence. But that dream, as my students keep pointing out to me this semester, is broken, and besides, it was never really their dream in the first place.

  “Holy shit,” the student says again, shaking his head. He’s a man of few words, a bearded hipster—a stoner, I suspect. He reminds me of how white Christians must imagine Jesus. Another student, a Latina, “first generation,” majoring in photography, stands to turn the lights back on. The rest lean back in their chairs.

  “Do you know what the most fucked-up thing is?” asks one student as she closes my laptop. She’s my favorite student this semester. One of my favorite students ever probably: a self-proclaimed mixed-race queer femme New Orleanian who could teach this class if I got out of her way. “So the fishermen couldn’t fish because of all the oil, right? So then BP hired them to take their boats out and spray dispersant into the ocean.” “Vessels of Opportunity,” BP called it. “The fishermen couldn’t say no because what choice did they have? But BP wouldn’t let them wear protective gear because they didn’t want the public to know they were putting poison in the ocean. They were more concerned with the optics than with doing the right thing.”

  She’s right, of course. Oil itself is toxic enough, but BP arguably made the disaster far worse by applying 1.8 million gallons of the controversial dispersant Corexit to the oil gushing from the well in order to break it up into trillions of tiny droplets and potentially keeping it from floating to the surface, reaching the shore, and making apparent the full scope of the damage it had caused. Five years after the spill, the Gulf is still devastated: oyster beds have been destroyed along the coast; fish continue to wash on shore dead or dying; dolphins in the Gulf are dying at rates four times higher than before the explosion. People who helped with the cleanup are sick, unable to work; people on the coast are sick, getting sicker. BP doesn’t have much to say on the matter: “The environmental catastrophe that so many feared, perhaps understandably at the time, did not come to pass, and . . . the Gulf is recovering faster than expected,” a public relations expert for the oil company writes. The depleted oyster beds? The dead baby dolphins? The fishermen bleeding from their ears and noses? That could be caused by anything.

  Anyway, my turn is over. The student who reminds me of white Jesus holds up a photograph he’s taken of a half-demolished building. “This is what gentrification is doing to queer culture,” he says. The assignment was to document a problem that most people don’t see. The next student holds up his phone and shows us a photo of a Jeff Koons sculpture, one of the balloon animals, which has just sold for about a zillion dollars at auction, he tells us. We all agree it’s total bullshit. The next says he’s going to describe some graffiti that got removed in the neighborhood. “Describe?” I ask. “Yeah, sorry,” he says. “I forgot my visuals.” My favorite student, the one pulling her blue hair up into a bun, uses her cell phone to play Pitbull and Ne-Yo’s “Time of Our Lives.” I raise an eyebrow. She holds up a hand to stop me from objecting and explains that the song is about the struggle to make ends meet and always failing, and that constant failure is why people give up and just go party instead. “We all have so many problems,” she says, “and because we can’t even solve our personal problems, like how to pay our rent, how can we even think about, much less solve, the big problems we all have in common?”

  * * *

  I’m still thinking about these questions on the drive home, about the “big problems” we watch unfolding in slow motion or, worse, the ones we can’t even see. Many of my students live near campus, in Houston’s Second Ward, which is home to the Houston Ship Channel, the second-largest petrochemical complex in the world. The Houston Ship Channel is where the oil industry’s dirty work is done: not only the refinement and distribution of petroleum itself, but also its vast network of ancillary industries, which each year release hundreds of millions of pounds of a number of dangerous chemicals into the air in service of the oil industry. These chemicals have been linked over and over again to rare forms of leukemia and other aggressive cancers. One study conducted in 2006 by the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston showed that the likelihood of developing a rare cancer is 56 percent greater for anyone who lives within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel than for people who live anywhere else.

  In fact, the Houston Ship Channel is what some might call a “sacrifice zone,” a term government officials coined during the Cold War to describe areas that had been hopelessly contaminated by the mining and processing of uranium into nuclear weapons. More recently, the term sacrifice zone has been applied more broadly to include low-income semi-industrial communities, often populated by African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and poor whites, whose disproportionate exposure to toxic substances forces them to sacrifice their health and safety in ways that more affluent people do not.

  Although sacrifice zone is a term that is increasingly applied to the entire Gulf Coast region as a result of the primary and ancillary operations of the oil industry, it’s not a term that I think of as I pull in to my own neighborhood, on the west side of Houston, far from the polluting smokestacks and refineries of the ship channel. Houston calls itself the �
�energy capital of the world” because it is home to four of the world’s seven super-major oil and gas companies, and all of them are headquartered in midrise glass-plated office buildings perched on wide green lawns on the west side of town, near where I live. Most of my neighbors work in the oil and gas industry. They wave from their yards as I walk my dog. From a distance, they seem like nice enough people.

  Would they still seem nice if an oil company built a refinery in our neighborhood? If the waterways in the park down the street were choked with toxic waste? If our children were breathing toxic fumes while they slept in their beds? If it were us dying of rare cancers? And, more importantly, if we can’t imagine being okay with that for our own neighborhood, our own health, our own children, why are we okay with it for anyone else?

  There are no comfortable answers to these questions, but we need to keep asking them anyway. In fact, one reason we have decided as a class to join the woman in the white skirt in a protest at BP headquarters is to question the seemingly widely held idea that some lives—any lives, for that matter—are worth their sacrifice.

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