I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric

5. An Open Door for Elijah

5 a n o p e n d o o r F o r e l I J a H In the fall of 2009, the Midwest Writing Centers Association held its annual conference in Rapid City, South Dakota. I chose to drive to the meeting rather than fly, and I chose to drive alone rather than traveling with consultants from the UNL Writing Center who were taking a school van. I wanted to see more of Nebraska than would be available to me from the window of an airplane or from a van window as it hurtled along the interstate. I wanted to drive through the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, about which I had read a great deal. And I wanted to drive home through Pine Ridge to Wounded Knee, to stop there, and feel, somehow, that place and its history. But there is another truth about my desire to drive to the conference. I love the experience of driving alone for long distances . I love casting myself into a journey. When I travel like this, I welcome the sense of being unmoored from the familiar. For me, the long road, the whoosh of wind over the car, the hum of wheels rolling over tarmac, take on a meditative quality. I lose for a time my sense of obligation to be myself as others know me, my sense of necessity to know my place in an ordered world, and to know where others belong in that world as well. The journey is an interstitial space and time between the known and the unknown. I am myself yet not myself. I know myself, yet am a stranger. I know the world yet the world is strange to me. I am drunk with the release from certainty—my consciousness of myself and others in the world shifting and transforming, opening with the landscapes through which I find my way. An Open Door For Elijah 121 In the opening pages of her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit describes the first time she got drunk. She was eight years old. At a Passover dinner, she mistook the goblet of wine set out for the prophet Elijah for her own glass and drank it down. Tradition holds, she writes, that Elijah will “come back to earth at the end of time and answer all the unanswerable questions” or “wander the earth in rags, answering difficult questions for scholars” (2005, 4). Passover tradition also includes leaving a door ajar so that when the prophet returns he will find an opening, a threshold between God’s time and ours. Solnit writes of the kind of altered consciousness (a kind of metaphorical drunkenness, at least in the sense of experiencing disequilibrium)—dislocated from the known, the familiar, and the certain—that might make us available intellectually, creatively , and spiritually to the possibility of learning that which we do not know at all. For Solnit, the most significant questions we can ask center around the unknown. How can we, she ponders, leave the door ajar for the unknown, “recognizing the role of the unforeseen . . . keeping your balance amid surprises . . . collaborating with chance . . . recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. . . . To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us” (2005, 5–6). Social justice movements, generally, and antiracism is no exception, demand this kind of calculation. Those of us who seek transformative change are called to imagine worlds not yet seen—wrestling with the winds of history and present tenses that threaten always to foreclose such openings—to keep the door ajar for possibilities that inhere to the unknown and to futures that are inconceivable given what we think we know. There is a certain romanticism, perhaps—a certain appealing mystery—to imagining the unknown as possibility and enacting an “open stance,” as Ratcliffe might say, to uncertainty (2006, 26). But there is this as well: the open door at Passover is an expression of trust in God’s protection against persecution 122 I HOPE I JOIN THE BAND and oppression. The tradition, some say, began during the Middle Ages with the practice of blood libel: the accusation by Christians—that Jews made a practice of killing Christian babies and drinking their blood—as a justification for persecution and oppression. An...