I had an
enchanting conversation about literature, the arts, the effect of media on
public policy and the effect of the internet on media with a homeless man
yesterday, and in spite of it possibly being the most noteworthy thing to
happen to me so far on this trip I'm not sure if I should mention it here.
Situational
awareness not being my strongest feature I had overlooked on no less than
twelve or thirteen separate occasions that there are at least two grocery
stores maybe three blocks away from here down Broad Street, and so when I
finally got tired of skipping meals after a week of no lunches I struck off
north from Wadham College and spent upwards of three hours wandering about
aimlessly.
(This
could have been avoided if I'd printed off some sort of map beforehand, but I'd
thought that getting lost and finding my way back again would be a fun way to
pass the late afternoon as I waited for the productive hours of the evening to
arrive. It wasn't, but I digress.)
On the way
back I happened across a little cooperative store and bought delicious sandwich
things enough to last for the next week at least for the price of a single meal
from one of the local restaurants, and having managed to do so at a store
that--if the stickers plastered everywhere were to be believed--prided itself
on its membership in the Fair Trade movement, I was experiencing a sensation
I'd like to describe as financial smugness as I finally got my bearings,
realized I had wound up almost directly west of the college, made for home.
He was
sitting outside of one of those groceries just off of Broad Street, with his
two layers of insulation--both stained with something brownish and
unidentifiable--the suitcase with his worldly possessions, his dog and his begging
hat. I try to always keep some spare change on my for meeting people like him,
and having just paid for four pounds of food with a twenty pound note I had
quite a bit more than usual, so I didn't even think about it when I dropped a
fistful of coins on top of the pile that was already there in front of him.
The
homeless beggars in Austin have a thank-you-kindly-sir routine, so I thought
nothing of it when he made his display of gratitude, but then he asked me where
I was going and that brought me to a halt. I've not yet had one back home do
that. There was a brief but uncomfortable pause as I weighed my expectations,
but quickly decided that it couldn't hurt to tell him. That led naturally into
him asking what I was doing at Wadham, and when I told him that I'm here to
study British literature the politely interested look on his face became
genuine.
Literature
had been one of his A-Level subjects, you see, when he had been getting ready
for college.
Admitting
that I'd never read Milton horrified him, but a quick redirection toward more
recent visionaries in speculative fiction saw us reconciled over a shared love
of Adams and Banks. He'd never been much for "women authors" and
couldn't comment on Austen for me, but was more than happy to suggest some reading
in the crime genre. On the nonfiction end of things, my criticism of Michael
Moore's use of hyperbolic language in his political writings sounded to him a
bit over intellectualized, and I was forced to cede that an intentionally
inflammatory style of journalism is useful with certain audiences--even if it
was a bit pathetic to try to stack Moore up against Hunter S. Thompson.
Evening
slipped in through the pauses for breath. There were more than enough for it to
fit, given that we talked for almost half an hour. It would be silly to give a
blow-by-blow of our dialogue, and also unnecessary; you've probably already got
a feel for it. He was widely and well read on subjects historic, present and
fictional, and delighted in it. The worst thing about his position, he said,
was that being on the streets meant that he didn't have access to the resources
to write effectively.
I've been
procrastinating on a story I want to write for about four months now. That
comment stung in a way I'd not known was possible.
Sam
Selvon was wrong, incidentally, about the emotions that motivate people to give
to the manifestly poor. It wasn't shame or guilt that I felt when I approached
him, or as I stood there talking to him. Those come later, when you're walking
away with another hundred pounds in your wallet trying furiously to stop
yourself from calculating the marginal utility of that money in your hands
versus his because you know if you do you'll realize that the only reason you
dumped a pile of coins into his hat and not a pile of bills is that your
ethical cognition is biased. Standing in front of that man, watching his
eyebrows sketch the animated tracery of genuine pleasure under the brim of his
grimy stocking cap as he laid out his understanding of the telecoms regulations
that made it more profitable for HBO to demand a cable subscription than to
switch to online distribution, the appropriate response is anger.
Anger
because this man was a foreigner in his own country. What else are you, really,
when you haven't a home of your own? Can you be a citizen of a society that's
locked you out in the cold? I think not. Anger, then, over the wastefulness of
it, of leaving a mind like that to try to keep itself warm because of some
personal financial hiccup. Anger because he demonstrably deserved a place in a
society that largely considers him outcaste.
And it's
funny, because in spite of being everything we've talked about when discussing
the plight of the West Indians in Britain, everything and more,
I'm not sure if it's correct to post this here because, you see, he was very,
very English.
Homelessness
is hardly a post-colonial condition, after all. It predates colonialism. It
predates the nation-states that, modernly, gave rise to colonialism. There's an
argument to be made, if you're not daunted by the horribly confused semantics
involved, that it predates civilization, arising cotemporally with the human
species.
Does it
follow that, in spite of suffering all the symptoms of the imperially
disinherited, he and those like him are to be excluded from the discussion of
the postcolonially afflicted over, and isn't this the malicious congruity to
top them all, their nationality?
(I almost
typed "ethnicity" before remembering that I'm talking about the
English. Hah!)
Our purpose here, as far as I've
been able to understand it, is the pursuit of some sort of alternative
perspective to the "native" one, some amorphous thing we expect to have fallen out of the uneasy mixture that resulted when the unwanted bastards of an empire came home to claim an inheritance that nobody'd thought to prepare for them. I ask, in all seriousness: is
dispossessed equally estranged as disinherited? Can circumstance make you a New
British Voice even if you're from Old British Blood? Or do he and his fall
outside the scope of our discussion because the country they face institutional discrimination in already has a high rate of occurrence for their alleles?
