Reentry

Who does this?

Mary McNeill

“In the age of atrocity, an intrinsic, natural, and essential covenant of human relating was betrayed and shattered. As a consequence, so many unsettled ghosts linger. They lurk. They haunt…

“People arrived from Europe with a raging barbarity and a will to violence. They committed numerous acts of genocide, trafficked human beings, and then proceeded to accuse those whose lives they had invaded, stolen, taken over, of being the barbarians, the savages, the uncivilized ones. It was a shameless act of psychic judo.

…What happened to the human being? How did the often luminous European culture, for example, lose its grip on the basics of what makes a being human? …Not even nature was spared — and we are experiencing the dire consequences of this offence today.

Who does this, and why?”

— Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

*

I should never have surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive.

~ Geronimo

In my youthful indecision, I kept going back and forth between Europe and the Texas I had grown up in, a continual drama of departure and reentry. What was I doing? I was ambivalent. It was a painful process of not finding my real life, but along the way I was mutating into a “neither this nor that” person…