Before bears in windows, before “street dance parties” in separate front yards, before communal singing from balconies, before all the creative ways that social distancing is bringing us socially closer, there was We Are Neighbors.
Published in early 2019, We are Neighbors: Albuquerque, NM speaks presciently to our current pandemic “moment” about the importance of connection and being neighbors in a world of personal isolation. We are Neighbors takes us into the wonder of wondering – in a caring way – about our neighbors.
In this collection – compelling prose poems and flash fiction by Hakim Bellamy with evocative photographs by Justin Thor Simenson of Albuquerque neighborhood scenes – the photographs show many trucks and cars, also corners and cacti and hydrants and shoes and porches and trees and shrubs (victim to “Manscaping”) and, of course, homes, homes, homes…but no people. Our neighbors are absent from our neighborhoods.
And yet Bellamy’s lyrical prose takes us to the doorstep of each home: we do not enter, but we are so close we can feel the pulse of the people living inside – sometimes hearing their conversations and often their longings. One example is a photograph of a car parked deep in the drive next to a home. Bellamy writes a story of an absence in a husband’s heart:
The battery died the day after his wife. Same spot for the past five years. He’s never driven it without her. But from time to time, only under a full moon, he will go sit in her passenger seat. Lay on her side of the wagon bed, and silently pray that he will one day regain his charm. (35)
Bellamy’s prose poems and flash fiction add magical wonder about the scenes that we ignore or, if we do see them, once might have considered to be eyesores.
Such is the mystery Bellamy weaves of a hole dug in a street that, after five years, has not yet been filled and fixed by the city. With the photograph by Simenson of what could be viewed as an eternal bureaucracy red-tape carbuncle, the story becomes a haunting legend of a missing child, with the neighborhood insisting the passage to the hidden world remain open.
While the above story and photo alone is worth the “price of admission” of only $10 to We Are Neighbors, each poetic vignette of life in a neighborhood that is oddly devoid of the neighbors gives pause and meditative reflection.
Today, people are reaching out to create community more than ever through the means available to us. Thank Heaven for cyber community made possible through the internet, specifically email, texts, social media and video conferencing.
While video conferencing is vibrant so that we can see others in the comfort and safety of our own homes, many are returning to using the easy vintage method of phone calls to hear the kind voice of a friend or loved one.
Additionally, we take walks more often in our neighborhoods, stopping at least six feet away to converse with neighbors we’ve spoken to seldom or never before. The pueblo fences and chain link fences offer the illusion of barrier, and of virus-safety, while beckoning us to talk with the one gardening or sitting inside. A year ago, Bellamy captured this, by writing:
Pueblo style fences aren’t meant to keep anything out. They are open arms…Pueblo fences aren’t there to keep you out, they are there to not let you leave. (31)
In this country, the American Dream separates sleep and wake, like a white picket fence. But in these neighborhoods chain link fences bring us together. (33)
Bellamy reminds us of the New Mexico-front-door-threshold-passage-rite that blesses us:
The politics of Tibetan prayer flags and chile ristras, has everything to do with harvest and gratitude. (29)
And, he reminds us that envy of our neighbors, while possibly innate, can serve to help us to be reflective, introspective of our personal identity and “name”:
The firmament envies the heaven, the sky that gets to be the target of our prayers and possibilities, the catcher of our dreams. The driveway envies the road. The road envies its name. (18)
Now, in our pandemic social distancing isolation, envy or judgment takes a back seat to desire for connection: we want to see our neighbors, we miss them, even those we have never met. In We are Neighbors, Bellamy evokes that longing to understand and connect on the human-level with these missing persons from our lives.
Anytime, but especially now, We Are Neighbors: Albuquerque, NM offers a superb read. Ordering information can be found at this link:
https://iminphotos.bigcartel.com/product/we-are-neighbors
P.S. Thanks to teleconferencing, you can Zoom in to meet with Hakim Bellamy next Wednesday, April 22, 2020, from 5:30 to 6:30 pm MDT in my From the Divine Studio: Creatives in Conversation Hour. Please join us!!
Join Hakim in Conversation next Wednesday, April 22, 2020, 5:30 to 6:30 pm MDT.
Photo credit: Adam Rubinstein
About Hakim:
Amazing award-winning poet, engaging performer and all-around super person, Hakim Bellamy is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Albuquerque, New Mexico (2012-2014). Author of Swear (West EndPress/UNM Press) and of We Are Neighbors: Albuquerque, NM, Hakim is Deputy Director of Cultural Services for the City of Albuquerque. He holds an M.A. in Communications from the University of New Mexico and is a W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network Fellow as well as a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow.