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Authors: Michael Allen Zell
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with the means or method fled Cuba. Others such as poet Heberto Padilla were assisted by U.S. intervention requests on their behalf to allow for a front door exit, so to speak.
When reading this essay prompted from The Interview, I was struck by one line spoken by Castro to Padilla when the two met on the verge of the dictator permitting the writer to leave the country. Referring to Padilla’s house, Castro said, Neither a book nor a brick will be touched . His intent may have been literal, but I can’t help but think that the bearded crocodile was speaking in an unintentionally associative manner. The common Freudian slip. Books, bricks, beard, buried . If one considers books as bricks in a threatening way, is there any difference ultimately between censoring and disallowing access to literature as compared to deftly devaluing and distracting from it, and do these two routes simply illustrate degrees of authoritarianism or multiple means to a single end? Am I unknowingly wandering inside The Crocodile? Are we all?
Day 17
Hannah said, I’m the only child of a white Cancer father and a black Leo mother, and neither astrologically racial group seemed to fit, so I felt perpetually at odds and without need of sadness to stay sad. The disharmony of being named in a way that endeared Hannah to neither group stretched the tightrope further. Hannah was adamant that she would get out of the West End and also away from Louisville, a plain place, as soon as she was old enough. When she was all of seven years old, her parents separated due to her father’s violent tendencies, and though Hannah wasn’t supposed to see him, she moved in with her father by the age of thirteen. Her mother was terribly hurt, although Hannah explained that she wanted to be out of that part of the city, and her father’s apartment downtown in Old Louisville wasn’t far away. The depositing of a child into one particular womb, much less locale, is no more than a gamble in which the child is at the mercy of odds, and Hannah knew that her dice roll came up short. Louisville, especially the West End (the half of the city in decline after being virtually abandoned by businesses and any of the populace that could afford to move east after the devastating flood back in 1937), didn’t look like her, talk like her, or feel like her. This was in a general sense, but it was the group she privately dubbed the psychohicks that particularly caused her to feel consternation and wanderlust. They were rough dangerous characters, most of whom came from the country or Appalachian region to the city for jobs or action. Hannah found it ironic that the rural areas were considered pastoral and holy, because so many of those she knew who hailed from that terrain were walking time bombs. Due to her mother’s vacuum cleaner sales conferences, typically held in places like the Bahamas or New Orleans, Hannah grasped for the occasional view outside by accompanying her mother whenever possible, once old enough to explore on her own. Hannah wears her hair in one long pigtail on occasion because of seeing an Asian woman doing the same on a beach in the islands and was told by a fortune teller that she, Hannah, was Oriental in another life. New Orleans was the first city in which she felt that people were like her, they were shades like her, and they spoke their minds like her. After returning home from these trips, the wrecking concerns returned and Hannah’s anger brimmed, so she joined an after-school boxing program at the neighborhood gym as a release. She maintained no relationships during high school, save for the occasional long distance one, so the gym and a way out became her mutual obsessions while she was a patient of impatience until graduation.
Before ending up in Southern Louisiana, Hannah lived in Las Vegas. Despite knowing rough neighborhoods in that Gemini city, she was taken aback by the area her as-is New
When reading this essay prompted from The Interview, I was struck by one line spoken by Castro to Padilla when the two met on the verge of the dictator permitting the writer to leave the country. Referring to Padilla’s house, Castro said, Neither a book nor a brick will be touched . His intent may have been literal, but I can’t help but think that the bearded crocodile was speaking in an unintentionally associative manner. The common Freudian slip. Books, bricks, beard, buried . If one considers books as bricks in a threatening way, is there any difference ultimately between censoring and disallowing access to literature as compared to deftly devaluing and distracting from it, and do these two routes simply illustrate degrees of authoritarianism or multiple means to a single end? Am I unknowingly wandering inside The Crocodile? Are we all?
Day 17
Hannah said, I’m the only child of a white Cancer father and a black Leo mother, and neither astrologically racial group seemed to fit, so I felt perpetually at odds and without need of sadness to stay sad. The disharmony of being named in a way that endeared Hannah to neither group stretched the tightrope further. Hannah was adamant that she would get out of the West End and also away from Louisville, a plain place, as soon as she was old enough. When she was all of seven years old, her parents separated due to her father’s violent tendencies, and though Hannah wasn’t supposed to see him, she moved in with her father by the age of thirteen. Her mother was terribly hurt, although Hannah explained that she wanted to be out of that part of the city, and her father’s apartment downtown in Old Louisville wasn’t far away. The depositing of a child into one particular womb, much less locale, is no more than a gamble in which the child is at the mercy of odds, and Hannah knew that her dice roll came up short. Louisville, especially the West End (the half of the city in decline after being virtually abandoned by businesses and any of the populace that could afford to move east after the devastating flood back in 1937), didn’t look like her, talk like her, or feel like her. This was in a general sense, but it was the group she privately dubbed the psychohicks that particularly caused her to feel consternation and wanderlust. They were rough dangerous characters, most of whom came from the country or Appalachian region to the city for jobs or action. Hannah found it ironic that the rural areas were considered pastoral and holy, because so many of those she knew who hailed from that terrain were walking time bombs. Due to her mother’s vacuum cleaner sales conferences, typically held in places like the Bahamas or New Orleans, Hannah grasped for the occasional view outside by accompanying her mother whenever possible, once old enough to explore on her own. Hannah wears her hair in one long pigtail on occasion because of seeing an Asian woman doing the same on a beach in the islands and was told by a fortune teller that she, Hannah, was Oriental in another life. New Orleans was the first city in which she felt that people were like her, they were shades like her, and they spoke their minds like her. After returning home from these trips, the wrecking concerns returned and Hannah’s anger brimmed, so she joined an after-school boxing program at the neighborhood gym as a release. She maintained no relationships during high school, save for the occasional long distance one, so the gym and a way out became her mutual obsessions while she was a patient of impatience until graduation.
Before ending up in Southern Louisiana, Hannah lived in Las Vegas. Despite knowing rough neighborhoods in that Gemini city, she was taken aback by the area her as-is New
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