Spirit Run

Spirit Run by Noé Alvarez

Throughout the pandemic, I’ve been running. I started with the aim of running a half marathon and, once I completed that, extended my goal to a marathon. In the course of these many months of training, I’ve run in the thickly drenching humidity of Louisiana summers. I’ve run in the mornings before hurricanes, when the winds whip the palm trees to and fro like flags or streamers and the light from the streetlamps is fogged with the moisture in the air. I’ve run in the rain, glasses off my face, shoes full of water.

None of this compares with the Indigenous-led ultramarathon, Peace and Dignity Journeys, that author Noé Alvarez chronicles in his memoir of his participation in the 2004 run. Tracing from Alaska to Panama, Peace and Dignity Journeys covers a 6000-mile course and is run in relays by a team of runners from Indigenous communities across Turtle Island. The runners connect with and participate in ceremony with the Indigenous nations and communities they pass on the course of their run, and undertake the entire journey as “the longest prayer in the world.”

This prayer, while deeply sacred, is by no means tranquil or easy or even unified. The runners who form Alvarez’s 2004 cohort come from different backgrounds, traditions, and communities; they do not all approach the run the same way, and there is constant conflict over which way is right, who should lead, and who should fall into line. The run is also undertaken with little food, little water, and little rest. With a low budget and tightly rationed supplies, the runners sometimes run up to 30 miles each day through all kinds of rain, cold, heat, and harassment from people passing by in cars. But each of the runners draw strength from their past experiences, their connections to their communities and traditions, and, sometimes, from one another. Alvarez, the child of two Mexican immigrants to Yakima, Washington, and the descendant (on his paternal grandfather’s side) of the Purépecha people, draws strength from his parents and his people. In vignettes that are simultaneously straightforward and evocative, refusing to flinch from hard realities but always taking time to document the smells, sights, and feelings of a given memory or story, Alvarez memorializes his parents’ childhood experiences in Mexico, their journeys from Mexico to Washington State, and the brutal labor and indignities many undocumented Mexican immigrants face in the racist, White supremacist, capitalist death cult that is the United States.

This memoir refuses to tie everything or anything up in a tidy bow—or even to tie up loose ends. It seems to gesture instead to the way that humans, especially those marginalized and oppressed, struggle to connect to the land, to their traditions, and to one another even when the abuse, terrorism, and racism of the system they live within is abundantly evident. It makes clear that making such connections is not a fairy tale but instead a complicated, exhausting, and powerful act of determination, participation, and witnessing. As a White descendant of colonizers, who took up running as combination mental health process and hobby during the 2020 pandemic, reading Spirit Run taught me, pushed me, and brought a new sense of humility and honor to each footfall during my morning runs. I can no longer take these steps without thinking, with each one, of the occupied nature of this land and how I too am a participant in this massive, collective, often-unconscious run we are all thronging in. Each run now is a reminder of what more I can ask of myself in contributing to the pursuit of peace, dignity, and justice.

Real Life

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Brandon Taylor’s debut novel Real Life zooms in on a weekend in the life of Wallace, a Black, gay biochemistry grad student from Alabama now living and studying in the glaring Whiteness of a Midwestern research university. The novel feels at once like an itch and a sigh: there’s a constant feeling of overwhelming dissatisfaction paired with utter resignation as Wallace heads to a gathering of his friends by the lake. He’s just found out that his nematode experiment has been contaminated by mold, and he’s only a few weeks removed from the death of his father, but it quickly becomes clear that the kind of intimacy he has with his friends is stilted at best. He hasn’t told them about his father’s death, and I could kind of understand why as, through the fog of his depression and self-doubt, Wallace meets up with his friends—they all come off as snippy, mean, oversensitive, and blasé at once.

The desultory conversational style of Wallace’s friends (who all seem like shades of one another, since there’s no real differentiation in how any of them talk) was what first reminded me of European or American modernist novels, but the parallels are really abundant. Time in Real Life tunnel-visions and then expands in a way that evoked Virginia Woolf. The friend group goes from one engagement to the next, drinking, sailing, dining, affecting urbanity and conviviality— even though none of them seem to like one another—in a way that made me think (unfortunately) of Hemingway. Though Tolstoy and a short story set in Madrid also garner mention, To the Lighthouse is the text most clearly referenced, and the novel as a whole is passionately invested in the exploration of the inner life, consciousness, emotions, anxieties, and traumas.

Because of Wallace’s identity as Black, Southern, and gay, his alienation amidst his White, Northern/Midwestern (or, kind of inexplicably, German or French), ambivalently queer friend group is completely believable, especially when even the friends he’s ostensibly closest to refuse to acknowledge or call out the multiple instances of racism that manifest in the various gatherings the novel details. Unfortunately, these moments of gut-punching believability are watered down by dialogue that in general reads like it came out of an affected book from the 1920s, rather than from the mouths of millennial biochem grad students living in the Midwest in 2020. This awkward, repetitive dialogue (often hinging on contrived misunderstandings rather than any really driving conflict) clashed with Taylor’s masterful interior prose, which fluttered and wheeled between the grotesque and the rapturous, pulling crystalline moments of insight, terror, and utter ambivalence out of the mundane: walking down a hallway or street, striking a tennis ball, drinking a glass of water.

There are fascinating parallels between the alienation of the modernist Lost Generation and the alienation of a traumatized gay Black Southern American who finds himself surrounded by mediocre and racist “Good White People.” Real Life just could have used a little more plot and some judicious editing to make these dynamics as vivid and, unfortunately, believable as they are in real real life.

The Purpose of Power

Photo by Marcela

The Purpose of Power by Alicia Garza

The Purpose of Power is a guidebook to navigating political power, organizing, and movements. Embodying the impact of the personal on the political—how identity politics is not just a sneering catchphrase of the Right but in fact a conceptual lens coined by the Combahee River Collective motivating action and investment, Garza writes a clear and engrossing book about politics and political power that is threaded through and anchored by reflections and accounts of her own life as a queer Black woman and organizer.

This book was written propulsively enough that I found it hard to put down, but it’s also one I’ll want to return to again and again for the straightforward, encouraging, and experienced way it presents guidance and frameworks for political organizing and movement. Garza is passionate and determinedly hopeful—“Hope is not the absence of despair—it is the ability to come back to our purpose, again and again” (289)—but this doesn’t cause her to stray from also being utterly practical and grounded. This constant balancing of passionate vision and insights won from long experience and on-the-ground work inspired me and filled me with admiration, even as Garza deflects position herself on a pedestal.

The Purpose of Power is in many ways an ode to the balancing act. Garza shows how to claim credit for ones own labor without trying to elevate oneself into a positional as exceptional. She elucidates the difference between popular fronts and united fronts and argues there is a time and place for each. She shows how patriarchy, racism, and other systems of oppression harm all who are caught within their jaws while never failing to center those who are most affected. She narrates the seeds and growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, but always contextualizes it as far from the be all end all of her work, and instead one movement among many movements in which she is a leader and a member. I learned a lot from The Purpose of Power and trusted it deeply for the way it always held complexity and expansiveness close, while simultaneously conveying a message that was straightforward, galvanizing, and clear.