LISTENING TO AMANDA CORMAN
Today I had another reminder of how my perspective on the world is warped. It comes from Amanda Gorman, the young woman who recited her poem at Joe Biden’s inauguration. There are several parts to this story.
The first part was the slowly unfolding story of the Titan submersible which caught our attention a few weeks ago. Five very rich people in a flawed submersible suddenly lost communication as they approached the wreck of the Titanic in very deep water. We were told that they had only enough air for several days during which an enormously expensive rescue effort was underway. It turned out that the submersible had imploded almost immediately on reaching the bottom and that the five people, some of whom had paid $250,000 apiece to be there, had died instantly.
I remember thinking at the time that if five people had been killed in a sudden car accident on I 40 which runs near my house, no one would have paid much attention. Yet our eyes were transfixed for days on this vain rescue effort. We all imagined what it would be to be slowly running out of air at the bottom of the ocean.
But what we weren’t imagining, which was much more terrifying was the death of 600 people on the overloaded trawler, Adriana, that had sunk off the coast of Greece a short time before the Titan disappeared. On this boat, which was in apparent distress and where a much smaller rescue effort would have saved hundreds of lives, people died slowly and terribly as they trampled each other as they tried to escape with hundreds of women and children locked below, unlike the Titan adventurers, who never knew what hit them.
On the Titan were wealthy people almost on a lark who had so much money that the adventure was simply something they could boast about afterward. On the Adriana were hundreds of people who had put all the money they had into an effort to escape poverty and threats of violence at home. And yet I never paid much attention to them and forgot about them as I turned to the rich adventurers.
But Amanda Gorman didn’t. She not only felt the pain of the 600 hundred people who died but connected their pain with the 130 enslaved people who were thrown off the slave ship, Zong, in 1781, because the ship, which was carrying twice as many people as it was built to carry, was running out of drinking water.
She wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times (July 15, 2023) in which she says the following, followed by a poem of remembrance titled, “In Memory of Those Still in the Water.”
I won’t quote the poem but one paragraph from her opinion piece really hurts me personally with no way for me to answer.
“The Western World often turns its back on the refugees and migrants fleeing the flames of conflict we’ve fanned, claiming it’s not our problem. Yet perhaps the real truth is unbearable: that we who watch others suffer and do nothing are responsible for the tragedies we witness. I write not to wash my hands clean of these crimes, but to honor those still in the water.”
But then I read more about Amanda Gorman and how difficult it was for her to write the poem that she read at Joe Biden’s inauguration. She was half way through writing the poem when the violent insurrection that attacked the Capitol and democracy itself happened and she felt a need as a 22 year old to respond to that attack as well as to celebrate a new day and then to read it in front of millions with a speech impediment that made speaking difficult for her. She was terrified and almost backed out. She knew she would be attacked for what she was saying. But she did it with grace.
I remember seeing in Paris in Montmartre in April of 2022, painted on a wall, the impact that Amanda Corman had half way around the world and remembered wondering then about the power of her words.
Sitting here this morning all I am doing is looking for something that touched me to respond to in my post of the day while Amanda Corman, with great courage, is rocking the world.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 