Like Sharon Mesmer's sister Toni, I was also a Baby Girl—Baby Girl Johnson—on some of my adoption and birth papers from the hospital, though not my birth certificate.
My adoptive mother and father were both ex-Navy, still youthful, and somewhat caught up if only peripherally in hippiedom. Living in Arcata, California, newly-wed, still searching for “the good life.” There's a great Halloween picture of them from the early eighties, mom in a boxer's costume and dad dressed like a clown—fitting, since she's the most hard-working person I've ever known, and he's got the range of emotion that includes clownish public joviality and the very opposite of that, rarely seen except in his private world.
They adopted me from a woman, Michaele, who lived, they discovered, only six blocks away. My adoptive mom's manager at the restaurant where she worked knew of my parents' unsuccessful attempts to become pregnant. He was also a friend of Michaele's family, and so put everyone in touch. A private adoption, arranged before my birth, and also an open adoption – which was instituted in large part because of pressure from Michaele's parents who wanted a granddaughter.
Michaele, from what I've been told, was genuine and nice but aloof, quiet, sometimes uncomfortable during meetings, and depressive. She was 19, a one-time runaway who at the age of 13 drove the car of her dismissive and possibly abusive stepfather from Northern California to New Mexico, arriving at the haven of her grandmother's house, who had raised her in early childhood. I have letters from Michaele written sporadically up until I was a young adolescent (we made several cross-country moves after I was born, so the open adoption became a correspondence). I've returned to one letter (I admit) like a divine text, in which she writes that sometimes she feels such deep sorrow for the world after taking in some news that her heart heaves. I've probably formed a rather “grand” sense of my birth-mother's character from details like these, as well as her story of my arrival in the world. She was raped by an acquaintance of her boyfriend's from the nearby Yurok Reservation. She lived with this boyfriend in a trailer outside of town and like many who live on the fringes of communities, he made “a living” dealing drugs. The rape was retaliation for a debt he hadn't yet canceled. I've realized that this story—deeply conflicted as it is with cultural and historical reverberations—has meant a lot to my imagination, as much it's been ephemeral to the day-to-day world built out of the environment with my parents and siblings. And it really is only a story, so that it's hard to exaggerate under how many lenses I've doubted what its truth is.
I think turning to writing arises out of this hardcore doubt of truth. In that doubt is also, trickily, the implicit and troubling desire to make the story true, or a story, to “get to the bottom of it,” whatever it turns out to be. Accusations made by white women against a tribal member aren't heard by a tribe without deep suspicion.
I lost touch with Michaele around 12 years old. I'd written her a pretty demanding letter asking for her to “tell the truth” about my origins; I had suddenly become conscious of at least some of the complications of her claim to rape, especially that it was perpetrated by the closest social “other” within her community. I wanted right then in all my adolescent angst to know once and for all if I could make a legitimate origin story for myself that wasn't founded on such a porous action. Her response was very brief; that she was sorry I was upset, that she had explained the way things happened already, and that maybe I ought to talk to my parents about it more. Later in my undergraduate Ethnic Studies classes at Mills College, I realized that my own doubt of the actions surrounding my birth wasn't ill-founded at all, though not necessarily a premonition of some as-yet-unrevealed Benjaminian kernel either (Benjamin coming later, of course, in graduate school. And it occurs to me now, too, how American of me to be so concerned with origins!).
Melinda Micco, an Oklahoma Seminole Indian, was my Ethnic Studies teacher, and with her I had important conversations about the charged histories of both rape and adoption between Indian communities and whites. It was actually her encouragement to not simply read the dubious story of rape as a negative moment of projected blame that has propelled me towards claiming that site of adoption and claiming that moment of violence as physical evidence of the legacy of erasure that attaches itself to the experiences of the New World's indigenous. What happened is no longer the site of question—but that the story has been passed through a generation, from my birth-mother to me, and that it has contributed to my cultural vision and intellectual pursuits, is without doubt. How it forms my visions and pursuits, and what I will do with it, is where urgent questioning—and ultimately action—fits in.
*
My brother is also adopted. He's African American, and we adopted him when I was five years old in Central Florida. I was a very good big sister and since both parents by that time were each working opposite schedules (a trend that continued through my living at home) I was a caregiver from this age on as much as I was a child. I went to a magnet school in Florida, and we lived in what I now recognize as a rather diverse apartment complex, where my bike-racing and fort-building playmates were black and Pakistani. At five years old I became conscious of race—it's hard to exaggerate these experiences either. I remember shopping in Publix, the grocery store, when a white woman stopped my mom in the dairy section and said what a cute baby my brother was, was she babysitting for a neighbor? My mom, an excited new mother again, proudly claimed Jordan as her own. The lady then asked if he was a drug baby, and wasn't my mother a good-hearted person to take him in. Back in the car with the groceries my mom couldn't hide her rage, or her tears. Jordan's adoption, like mine, fell into my parents' lap—his birth mother was our literal next door neighbor and her 6-year-old daughter was my playmate. His adoption wasn't a crusading act, though as I grew up, as I learned, his adoption would be seen by some as yet more evidence of white hubris and patronizing do-good-ness.
Jordan's adoption was characterized by much more social tension than mine as he got older. I could pass as my parent's biological child, and as a white girl. In predominantly white Western Washington (where we later moved), where PCness is the only way to be, he was the receiver of more racial slurs and jokes —and outright discrimination—than I want to recall. Jordan's experience of alienation in a rural white neighborhood filled me with rage, empathy and sadness. Later I recognized these as complicated gifts, and the rage has been sublimated into a thorough desire to speak and to act. All of the tension that I've spoken to here I really do think of as an important gift. I don't know if I would be able to pay attention to, to empathize with, or desire to understand global conflicts between different groups of people without having analogies of these conflicts in my own family's experiences.
*
There's a lot left out of this account. That we moved to Florida to live with my mother's parents on the heels of my family filing bankruptcy. I was three at that time. That I also have a sister born when I was eleven, and that her story is also rich in surprising ways. That we had, I think now more than ever, a rather typical middle-class experience: when the food budget didn't quite make it at the end of the week, that remaining 20 bucks worth of milk, eggs, coffee and rented movie for the kids went on the credit card, new school shoes went on the credit card, and so debts mounted up once again after the bankruptcy was finally paid off. That foreclosure on the house my parents still don't own has been a looming possibility. And I have assumed debt that is shockingly large for my education—even with a smattering of scholarships over the years, and having completed all but one semester (that transformative one at Mills) at public colleges where I paid reduced in-state fees and tuition.
There are so many lenses through which to read, or write, a story of becoming a social participant, and adoption from a place and from people to another place and to other people is just one lens. I've been lead to writing through this awareness which has been seriously frustrating and also seriously liberating. That “truth” now contains many more connotations than it did when I was growing up in search of a truth is a product of my education—it's a product of my reading and writing. At the same time that I took those Ethnic Studies classes, I took a graduate-level class with Stephen Ratcliffe called Listening to Reading. All of a sudden, I was reading Leslie Scalapino, Charles Bernstein, Joan Retallack, Myung Mi Kim, Fanny Howe, Juliana Spahr, Lyn Hejinian, Harryette Mullen, Joanne Kyger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and many others. During those few months I think my mind grew more than it has before or since—reading histories of the Americas that overturned many unspoken dominant cultural values, and at the same time reading incredibly innovative poets. I ate it all up, but I also felt a deep tension between all this history that I felt so important and all this writing, some of which (certainly not all) seemed to distance itself or actively unwrite positions from which new identities and new histories could be formed.
So it was Cha's Dictee that became my total “AHA!” text. Innovative, exciting, unpredictable, working with history and yet doing it in a way that didn't reduce. I think adoption has found itself in my writing through attempts to place that history within contexts, different each time, so that it adds to the dimensions of the social spaces I inhabit and those I try to understand.
PLEASE SHARE A SAMPLE POEM(S) ADDRESSING (IN PART) ADOPTION:
The following excerpt is from a book-length series Taxonomy Bent. I hadn't actually thought about this text in terms of adoption until prompted by responding to Eileen Tabios’ Call to participate in this blog. So like Judith Roitman says her writing just might be “infused,” it's up to the reader to make connections between poetry and the subjects of this blog post.
In the “postscript” there's a direct quote from Dictee.
III. Bent
Not everything can be cut at the joints
—Technological Commons
Horizon, treed
“horizon this, before it's treed:
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“
What is typology for location—
assignment—
wispy tracers and legitimate repercussions
bound
“I felt the moment receding” you recite
horizons are raccooned specimens—
our fallout
1. the primacy of the consecutive subject
haunted an epilogue that circulated
astrological projections of objects not even
bound up by exchange, they were our exchange.
2. Better yet, what flattened this hopeful
to querulous midnight junctures of flesh-meets-flesh
because the horizon spanned in its particular plane
spanning us flat approaches
3. We tried to circumvent. amusing.
4. then, switching gears, wrote about
temporary autonomous interventions
after membering a sound installation
and attending the worker's rights rally gathered
around the fountain.
The group speak
bothered me even though I wanted their
RIGHTS respected. The fountain poured down all
around us drowning out megaphones. The water
slipped untroubled neither this drop nor that stream –
not your leg nor my dollar
not bothered by boundary speak or “right to
inhabit” or what member is dangling in
public, erect –
5. Then the excavation sites around our
verbiage exist to put astral-knowledge
in perpetual hibernation
member, member
we are our own interlude,
“split”
<<<<<<|>>>>>
6. The most intimate relationship is socially
unacknowledged and totally uninstituted.
Bond of exclusivity at once ironic and
anarchic – our working alliance of promised possibility
[that famous courtesan and her painted smile]
7. Placed in hibernation our revolt at the layered
efficiencies of garages, aqueducts, term “personnel:”
locked up our brief respites from flat horizon-dictation
wanna be numerous and
unexclusive, together?
I remember you asked
I said, 'inconclusive' and anyway
always traveling
—after a juncture makes you stand abrupt
alert having meddled in the general
“flow” —worth meddling—
sight becomes the way to bring
the moment into body—
sight gorges on roughage
“it’s so good to see you again”
seeing you: seeing the leftover filaments, fallout
8. Friendly or business-like endeavors
connect seven members and their
unforeseen eighth
by way of the unpublicized pleasuredome.
“poetry by way of coy by way of
half-profile in muted light and drafty windows
survives an explosion at least in flesh:
nice to meet you, again”
Re-member my makeshift
pleasuredome ['Autonomous' 'witness']
& ['Singular' players]
(While far off landing signifying rights to
speech, rights to zoning)
[Contradiction in terms]
9. Morph your shattered and sticky
pieces back into character,
remember you’re a direct relative
of the hyperreal.
<<<<<<|>>>>>
(For what responsibility
exists when written out of it—
Broken social contracts at the fountain
reincite the affects as result of
boardroom meetings and after hours
on the trains, in exchange)
I'm a direct relative of
those
scalper and hangman
I'm a direct relative of
those
scalper and hangman
(jumping on the train again
to get my food – return like
impulse like blink like jolt
whizzing past my selves in good order –
our policed order indefinitely hinges encounters
my multiple molecular
detonations, little fireworks –
amorphous beasts [still] get the drive)
[postscript]:
“is that enough?”
what feeling inside you
“what's your family?”
the implication being what fence sits upon our grounds
tertium quid neither one thing nor the other
tattooed on rib
re-collect and distribute
these methodological tremors in adult-life
containers, commuting trains –
the Map grows even after its
author
ABOUT THE POET:
Natalie Knight is the author of the chapbooks ARCHIPELAGOS (Punch Press), prairies (scantily clad press), and xenia (Furniture Press). Poems, reviews, and collaborative critical writing appear in Jacket, West Coast Line, Octopus, foam:e, Barzakh, Little Red Leaves, The Poetic Front, Critiphoria, and H_NGM_N. She has a B.A. from The Evergreen State College and is a Carson Carr Diversity Scholar and PhD student at University at Albany, SUNY.
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