358 Bus Stop, Torrence Ave. & Pulaski Rd.
Calumet City, Illinois

By Ava Tomasula y Garcia

“forgive my geography, it’s true i’m obsessed

with maps.” –José Olivarez, “Wherever I’m at That Land Is Chicago”

The Calumet Region coheres into shape and sense through the totalizing language of maps. The gridmarks through which reality has been arranged here for over two hundred years are that of longitude, latitude, scale, treaty boundary, x-marks-the-spot. Isn’t that the work that maps do, after all? They make the real, real. Chart, fix, occupy, extract. They make the given world seem inevitable.

I’ve been looking at these maps for a long time, trying to understand how land becomes resource and then gets thrown away. How people continue to live on it and love it.

José Olivarez is a poet from Calumet City, the city that takes its name from this Region. I think he gets it. His images always seem to return home to the Region. This is true even when he’s battling, word by word, the terms of that return: this is one of the most segregated and polluted areas in the lands now called the United States. Looking at the maps, the Calumet Region emerges as a total sacrifice zone; a waste dump for centuries of capitalism; an overdetermined and overburdened 90-ish-square miles stretching from South Chicago through Northwest Indiana along the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

A hard place to call home. Even harder not to go back to the map to describe it; harder still not to get trapped by the dense tangle of border lines and scale markers and RxR crossings which would choke you. To not feel like there’s no way out of the world its representations would have you believe are inevitable.

Blueprints to the city-sized steel mills, past and present. Hazardous waste containment sites marked out on a grid. So-called “early settlement” maps of Indiana and Illinois show how the Potawatomi Nation was rounded up and cornered by gunpoint. How Menominee himself refused to sell Neshnabé land even after he was viciously detained by settler militia men. See how quickly land speculation is mapped into reality in the wake of the Trail of Tears: limestone quarries marked out, coal veins sought, railroad lines laid down.

Chicago booms into existence on the map, literally constructed from the “raw materials” of the cleared Calumet: water, wood, limestone, coal, sand for cement, and clay for bricks. The world’s first refrigerated train cars, carrying meat from the Chicago stockyards across the country, cooled by ice cut from Calumet lakes and rivers and running the rail lines that crisscross the Region today. Plat maps showing how houses butt up against the Standard Oil refinery, now BP. 

My family’s history of living and working around the Region walks in lockstep with a history of illness: cancer and dementia from so much pollution, from day in and day out drinking in the soils and waters that industry has determined must be wasted for bigger profits. It seems like illness is hard baked into what it means to be from here, and, for me, so is leaving. When Olivarez writes, “i needed to believe suffering was honorable,” the line hits hard.

Yet what I love most about Olivarez’s work is that, while always being grounded in place, he doesn’t write about the map. He doesn’t “mistake the map for the territory,” as Sylvia Wynter put it. This poetry doesn’t go around, in Olivarez’s words “pretending the bones / are the real thing.” He’s after life, not its flattening. When I take the bus up Torrence Ave. through Cal City, past the train lines, past the scrap metal yard, past the recycler plant, I’m riding through territory which exceeds those bones. The land doesn’t give up. Look one way and you see intermodals speeding by on miles of burnt-out rail lines. Look the other way and you see sand cranes and egrets burst out of the dune grass. A cloud of starlings flits through the sunset. Marsh water floods the road. Heavy industry mixes with the watery, oh-so-alive earth.

Olivarez finds the little cracks in the totality. His images of life in Calumet City mix with my own memories, peeling themselves off the map: Olivarez in “Cal City Winter” as a kid on another frozen winter morning, “jumping up & down at the bus stop / trying to warm up.” My own memories, waiting in the car for Berta to get off work at the Burger King at River Oaks Mall, breath curling in the December air. Biting into a gordita from Loli’s, steaming hot down my throat. Springtime bugs gliding back and forth on the Little Cal River, weaving a gossamer haze, summer heat shimmering, a thousand mirages. People always say that we have the prettiest sunsets, then joke that it is because of the pollution. The road the car snakes along was once the shore of an ancient lake, was taken over by settler stagecoaches, was a sand mining pit, was paved over for scrap trucks to traverse. You settle into place.

This is what no map will ever show but sometimes a poem does: the way individual lives layer up moments of anger, pain, and love — how these emotions sediment themselves into place as tracks for others to walk whom you may never meet. This is what living in the Calumet means, too. Olivarez’s poetry has become my map to the Cal Region. Not a map as in chart, fix, occupy, extract. A map as in “i’m always out south / of somewhere. i know the sun rises / in Lake Michigan & sets out west.”

With it, I’m trying to navigate those questions that I haven’t been able to figure out for my own life: “I want to learn what the birds know— / to love a home when it is abundant / & to leave when the love stops.”

Olivarez’s map is a question in answer to my questions. Where does a person begin and the place they’re from end? Can you ever leave a home? Can a home ever cease to be that — can it be ground out, like a cigarette butt on a cold winter morning? When you leave, do your memories go with you? Or do some of them stay behind, settling into the landscape?

Surely, some mark of the love a place gave you and that you gave back stays in the soil. Surely.

Ava Tomasula y Garcia was born in 1994 in Chicago and grew up in South Bend, IN. She currently lives in New York City, studying medical anthropology as applied to the so-called “undiagnosed” illnesses of the Calumet Region. Before, she worked at the Southeast Side of Chicago’s Centro de Trabajadores Unidos.

The post José Olivarez – Calumet City, Illinois appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Before she left Long Island to return to the cherry capital of our country, northern Michigan — where she was a member of the sixth generation of a farming family — Carolyn gave me a large book to fill with my writings. I’d originally sought her out about 20 years ago. I had a column on “women in the arts” in a small, now folded, monthly women’s newspaper. I’d interviewed upwards of 50 artists, but until Carolyn, I hadn’t yet found a writer. Thus began our friendship, most of which took place

1. According to Wikipedia, Weequahic is derived from a Lenape word “wee-qua-chick” meaning “head of the cove.” The high school is the one Philip Roth graduated from less than a decade later.

through correspondence. In late March 2019, Carolyn passed away from the complications of early onset dementia likely exacerbated by chemotherapy for breast cancer.

In addition to her expertise about cherry farming, Carolyn was a lawyer, and she made her living as a freelance editor. Though she wrote masterful stories, she had yet to publish a book. The publication of her book happened by way of her husband — the writer Stephen Lewis — who not only became her caregiver but took it upon himself to find Carolyn’s work a publisher. The Wolfkeeper was published by Mission Point Press three months after Carolyn’s death. Of the 10 stories in this collection, five had been published in literary journals, one of which was a semi-finalist in several literary competitions.

Generally speaking, these stories present a cast of quirky, charming characters, some of whom we see multiple times throughout the stories, but the dominating force is the natural world, the land and its lover — the great lake. The lens through which we behold this world holds a clarity that imbues itself in each word. The words urge us to slow down, to take the puzzle pieces and fondle them — replete with imagery, sound and the occasional understatement — leaving us to finish the stories ourselves.

While reading, I’m taken to a time and place that is otherwise unrecognizable. The land is both pristine and unforgiving, and an unearthly community exists between the geography and its two- and four-legged inhabitants.

These stories read like myths, partly due to the texture and luminosity of the prose, along with the compression that asks us to create this world in our minds, to see its pictures, to smell its smells and hear its sounds. We are taken far north to a part of the U.S. that shares a watery border with Canada, a terrain that is more often than not covered with snow, where horses pull a sled runner across the ice, and sometimes the ice melts or breaks, and sometimes there’s a seam through which a ton of lumber falls. These stories are populated by lumbermen and fishermen and impoverished families where there is abuse, where religion is known more for the harm it does than for salvation. These are stories of Jesuits and Indigenous peoples, some where there is a mix within the same family. There is a story with a body that must be chipped from the ice, a story about a bet that will become as deadly as the weather, about women running a “Tavern of Dreams,” about the wives of the “King of the Mormons” left to fend for themselves on an island in Lake Michigan in the dead of winter.

One sees here a tenderness, a ferocious love of place and respect for its denizens who thrive here. The first story envelops the reader in a sanctified world where a very old man is living out his days in a cabin with a swinging door. It is cold, “for winter had not yet invited spring in.” A young woman appears whose job it seems is to stoke the fire and make sure the man will not starve. She leaves a number of warm loaves of bread stored in a vine basket above the hearth, some of which he proffers to the wolf who visits him and seems to know this man well.

There is a life force that makes itself evident in each of these stories. The dusk has a mouth. The cries of wolves “float down” from the cliffs.

The voice of Carolyn J. Lewis’s stories is the voice of the land. If it could speak, in a language we might intuit, it would use her voice, it would say we connect — the land sees to that. It calls us to itself. We rise to the demands of time and place, what in fiction we call the setting. In Carolyn’s book, it’s the interaction between setting and character that remains so defining, so revelatory.

One could say that setting provides the challenge of our lives even now. That which is difficult presents as an opportunity, directs us to see beyond the moment, beyond mortality, beyond fear, even — offers a connection to what some have called grace: whether it is through World War II, whether it is a great lake melting under us, whether it is Covid-19, whether it is Black Lives Matter, whether it’s a liminal moment in our very democracy. We make a choice in this moment of clarity when we glimpse the fragility of human bodies, of human institutions, of human civilization; we respond with something more noble than the insatiable appetites of the self.

We will look back one day. We will see what was once insoluble. We will see how we changed our world.

In her introductory epigraph, Carolyn writes: In the land there is a longing/and the longing is in the people,/and the people who come to it/ have a name for it they never speak.

The post There is A Longing appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.