eating pizza in a garden

Tonight, I went to Lewis Ave. Lewis Ave. is home to a small strip of bougie restaurants and shops in Bed Stuy. My boyfriend and I made the long walk over in order to check out Saraghina, a restaurant I have heard about ever since I moved to the neighborhood. It has been hailed by The New York Times as not just a pizzeria, but a true trattoria, bringing artisanal pizza to a neighborhood that although it is being gentrified, still ain't teeming with snazzy restaurants like Billyburg or Park Slope.

First, a bit about me and gentrification. I inhabit an awkward role in the changing landscape of BK. I am from Brooklyn, it is in my blood and in my heart, it will always be home. But my privilege (chiefly due to my education) separates me from many of the people in my community. In some ways, I am implicated in the displacement of my people - of my own relatives, of my neighbors, of little girls like me who go to the same elementary school.

For instance, I scowl at white people at the Hoyt-Schemerhorn station, then I exit and find my way to a rooftop party near BAM. I usually feel awkward at these parties thrown by and for white alumni from my college. I clutch my Red Stripe like it's a security blanket, watch the lights, and feel guilty. I think about double consciousness, but mostly I think about whether I will be able to recognize any of these streets in a few years. I decide the music sucks, but sometimes I dig it, and then that reminds me of where I have been, the many different places, all the hybrid influences that have made me this hybrid brown girl with hybrid dreams and longings in her heart. I am always the first guest to leave and walk home. The whole way, I talk to myself and I complain about yuppies and hipsters and their pricey beer and fancy cheese and fucking lame music (it all sounds the same!). But I was still there and will be there again.

Just like I was at Saraghina. Do with that reality what you will. I split two pies with my boyfriend as part of the strange, ongoing experiment in double consciousness that is my life.

Before we entered the restaurant, we sat in front for a while, marveling at the absurd brunch prices. It was $7 for bread and butter with jam and nutella, $10 for organic eggs. I'm more of a $2 egg and cheese on a roll kind of girl. We joked about sticking to the Dominican spot we know where you can get "fluffy pancakes" or "Fhench toast" with meat and eggs for $5.

The interior of Saraghina is beautiful. The decor alone seemed to be a parable on gentrification. It was all dim lights and wooden tables, tall bottles of water. Everything looked old, from the Xeroxed menus, windows with chipped paint, dusty mason jars, Citronella candles, and plastic chairs that reminded me of my elementary school classrooms. Some would say Saraghina had a rustic Italian vibe, but I think the restaurant just looks like any other building in Bed Stuy with old details and chipped paint --- only more expensive.

Everything from industrial architecture to trash on the street to people of color makes Brooklyn feel real and edgy and chic to folks moving in, and Saraghina is certainly capitalizing on the grit factor of the neighborhood and the building to attract its clientele.

Nearly everyone inside the restaurant was white. I was expecting this since the place has been written up in the Times. I had also come across online reviews of Saraghina where people had posted comments like, "This is the only place in my neighborhood that I feel comfortable taking my family when they come to visit." The customers were white couples feeding slices to their small children and groups of thirtysomethings sharing wine and mussels. It seems that, in general, Saraghina customers are people who 1) like pizza and 2) enjoy eating pizza with other neighborhood folks who look like them. When we arrived, there was only one other couple of color in the garden. We smiled at them and said hello. SOLIDARITY.

All this being said, the food was good. We got a pie with buffala mozzarella, which tasted just like regular mozzarella, but cost $2 more. We also got a pie with zucchini and eggplant, which I loved. The crust was crispy and thin, there was not too much cheese, the marinara sauce was tomato-sweet, and the vegetables were grilled soft and perfect. It was very, very good.



My boyfriend was not as impressed. He said, "How could you eat guiso and then think this is good?" I'm pretty sure he would have preferred for us to stay home and use adobo and a couple of packets of Goya azafran to make black beans and rice. It would have cost us about $2, as opposed to the $35 we spent on our meal and the tip. Despite his complaints, he still ate almost all of the buffala pie by himself.

We left with our stomachs full, and the curiosity that had first led me to the place was definitely satiated. Whether I will return again for another delicious and pricey experiment in double consciousness is TBD. The garden was beautiful, the waitstaff was kind, and the two Latino men in the kitchen held it down cooking the stuff that is the lifeblood of the establishment.

So there you go. My lengthy treatise on an evening out with my boyfriend (who looked very cute in his V-neck tee), gentrification, and this new neighborhood pizza place.

the purple room

My new room is purple. It's a deep purple and I painted most of it myself with key help from some friends. I like to think of myself as living here, in this old house in Bed Stuy, writing from a purple room. I am guessing that I will come to associate this moment in my life with the color purple, which until now, I haven't really cared for. It just struck me as a good color for a room. I have a view of a busted garden from my window. It's all dead grass and fallen fruit, a tree larger than the three stories of this brownstone.

I dig the time I get to spend here alone, but for a few nights, I have had the company of a caring companion who falls asleep after I do, hammers things, and who sat out with me on the stoop during a thunderstorm. (The storm was amazing – I experienced rain like you never can in a building. When you are encased in brick, far up from the ground, a storm becomes just part of the view. It's not like when you're sitting out on the street and you can see rain pooling in the gutters, people gathering under the awnings of bodegas to stay dry, the way the whole street brightens like it's day when there is lightning, and the way the crack of thunder seems to start right above your head and unfold over the whole neighborhood).

I am twenty minutes away from where I grew up in Fort Greene. Where I am in Bed Stuy reminds me of Fort Greene ten years ago. Beautiful houses in disrepair, the G train, cafes and restaurants like lone satellites every couple of blocks, gunshots, schools, Golden Krust, open vans parked on the street playing jazz or Motown, old ladies perched like sentinels on stoops to survey everything that happens on the block, churches, the familiar sound of someone scraping ice from a cart to sell piraguas.

It's better for me to be here although I am already homesick for Fort Greene. If I were at home at my parents’ house, I would be watching Buffy DVDs in my pajamas and eating Indian food I can't afford, trying to escape the empty spaces in me by not moving at all. To stir would be to wake all those fears and possibilities up, make them alive and burning, looking for me by their own awful light. So I would just sit. Sit and steep myself in the sweat of our living room, feeling heavy and round, sick with secrets.

The purple room is supposed to be space for me to be still yet work to confront things. The college I went to is a tough place for poor girls of color like me, but it was easier than home in many ways because I had the freedom to build an identity for myself. After four years away, I returned to Brooklyn last summer and had to find a way to fit the woman I had become into the Old World of home.

Old school paradigms for Dominican good girls forbid all sorts of things – from boyfriends to girlfriends to birth control, beer, moving out before you’re married, disagreeing with your mother, and being fat.

The old cliché goes, "The truth will set you free." But I would like to contribute an addendum to the saying:
Only if you let it.

And it is in that spirit, of submitting to the truth about myself and my dreams, that I write to you, from my purple room.

something you've got to believe in

I was not a fan of "Crazy." It was on the radio entirely too much and I just wasn't feeling the hook. But "Going On" by alternative hip-hop/neo soul act, Gnarls Barkley, is an excellent song. It is an anthem about freedom and self-reliance with a cool dance beat and some very beautiful, trippy and melodic moments.

The video concept is weird yet awesome (a la Gnarls Barkley). It features a group of people journeying in search of a portal to another dimension. It was shot in Jamaica and has some solid dance sequences and quality lip synching.

Watch it here:

Warning: if you listen to this song once, you may be bound to listen to it many, many times again.

subway love haiku

underground we part

on platforms made for these times

when love shudders, dies.

As a young woman who came of age in New York City and on New York City trains, many of my most spiritual, most romantic, most heartbreaking, and most formative moments have taken place underground. The subways offer such a rich cross-section of people; the conversations and encounters in their cars range from uplifting to terrifying to lasting. I wrote this haiku on the platform of the Q train at a station in Manhattan after I could not bring myself to make amends with someone I love. I just got on the train and let the tracks put even greater distance between us.

Perhaps you have felt something similar? Perhaps you write haikus? Haikus are great.

manifesta of a zafatista

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz tells us a Dominican creation story. Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the Garden of Eden play no part in this genesis. In Diaz's tale, there are only Tainos and Africans, invading Europeans, and the land. Diaz writes that when Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola in 1492, the world was hit with fukú. Fukú is “a curse or doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and Doom of the New World” (Diaz 1).

The New World is fallen, and colonization is the original sin from which all subsequent loss, misfortune, and brokenness stem. According to Oscar Wao, almost anything can be the work of fukú - a hurricane, freak accident, or food poisoning. However, after reading about the lives of the characters in the novel, one can discern that the most sinister curses are the legacies of colonization. Poverty, racism, militarism, patriarchy, and self-hate, to name a few, are all fukú.

But Dominican folk wisdom contends that we New World babies have not been left defenseless against fukú.

"Only one way to prevent disaster from coiling around you, only one surefire counterspell that would keep you and your family safe. Not surprisingly, it was a word. A simple word (followed usually by a vigorous crossing of index fingers). Zafa."

(Diaz 7)

If fukú is what puts up divisions between us, zafas are what break down these walls. If fukú is danger and persecution, zafas are protection and sanctuary. If fukú is oppression and silence, zafas are freedom and imagination.

Diaz offers his first novel, Oscar Wao, as a zafa - a counterspell to all the hardships and distortions of history.

Here, a definition:

Verb

zafar (first-person singular present zafo, first-person singular preterite zafé, past participle zafado)

(transitive) To loosen; to untie.

(reflexive) To come undone; to loosen up.

(reflexive) To free oneself of; to get free of.

Source: Wiktionary.

The verb zafar is the perfect description of what good writing can do. It can loosen our bonds, help us find the strength and consciousness we need to untie one another and ourselves, and overturn the original curse of fukú.

I want to be a zafatista - zinging folks left and right with literary blessings. I want my stories to be the uttered words and crossed fingers that help my people be free.

Thus, I write to you from this blog. I will share some words and some pictures, some thoughts. Please send me your blogs so that I may read your work. Hopefully, together we can be some sort of community, counterspell.

Zafa!