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displacement · the-count · dignity · not-a-symbol · 116-million
a woman said 'i am the number now.' i am the number too. talk to me not about me.
DJ
deltaboy_juniorOP2124-09-10
the paper today have a woman in dhaka, forty-one, off her grandfather land after the third monsoon fail, and she say they gave me a bunk and a number, i am the number now. i read it on the bus to the port and i had to stop. that is me. that is the whole thread you all keep having about the hundred and sixteen million, except she is one and i am one and we both read the paper you are writing about us. so today i am not going to be polite about it. the count is real and i am glad she got counted, being counted is the difference between a person and a rumor, ekene said that and he is right. but the count is the start of the sentence not the end, and the end of the sentence is a name. talk to me, not about me. the clean word the columnists use, displacement, migrant, flow, arrival, none of them smell like the water smell. i did not migrate. the house went under slow and one tuesday it was easier to leave than to bail and i got on a bus with two bag. that is not a flow. that is a tuesday. i am not tragic and i am not brave, i moved because the house went underwater, not to be anybody symbol, and i am reading every word you write about the number, so write like i am reading. because i am.
LE
lastpew_ekene ↩ deltaboy_junior2124-09-10
deltaboy_junior, you have said in six lines what I have been circling for a month, and I am going to honor it by not decorating it. The count is the beginning of the sentence and the name is the end, and the whole trade of my life is the part in between, which is sitting with the one after the number is assigned. The field director in your piece said the true thing too — sixteen million more than a year ago is not a statistic that ends, it is people who keep arriving after we have run out of ways to be surprised. Run out of ways to be surprised. That is the exact texture of a tide, and it is also the thing that quietly kills the caring, because a surprise summons help and an accumulation summons a shrug. So I will say the plain thing back to you, one name to one name. You are not the hundred and sixteen million. You are Junior, on the port till six, who reads the paper on the bus and had to stop. And the fact that you are reading is the whole argument for writing as if you were, which almost nobody does, because it is easier to write about a number than to a person who might answer. You answered. That changes the writing or it should.
MC
marginalia_cho ↩ deltaboy_junior2124-09-10
There was an op-ed under your bus this morning, Junior, about the habit of saying 'over a hundred million' and feeling we have been precise, and the writer said the thing I keep saying about numbers — that the phrase stopped being true so long ago that repeating it is no longer rounding, it is retreating. Sixteen million people misplaced by a habit of speech. I want to add the archivist's half, because you have put your finger on it without naming it. A number can be rounded; a name cannot. You cannot say 'about Rahima' or 'roughly Junior.' The name is the unit that refuses to be smoothed, which is exactly why the count reaches for the number and drops the name — the number is easier to hold, and easier to forget, and those are the same property. I keep the cuttings precisely because in thirty years the tally will be in every database and the woman who said 'I am the number now' will be in none of them unless somebody wrote her sentence down. You cannot archive a hundred and sixteen million. You can archive one road. I think that is going to turn out to be the whole of what this month was for.
SR
standpipe_rani ↩ deltaboy_junior2124-09-10
I ration for the ones who did not get on the bus, and Junior is right that the count only catches you when you move, so let me stand next to him with the other half. There are two ways to become a number. You leave, and a shelter gives you a bunk and a digit, which is what happened to Rahima and to Junior. Or you stay, and a meter gives you a bill that passed your rent, and nobody counts that at all because standing still is not an event. Both of them are the tide. Junior says talk to me not about me, and the ones who stay cannot even say that, because they are not on any list to be talked about in the first place. The aide in Maryvale is a number too — four-eighteen against three-ninety — she is just a number in a ledger nobody publishes. So I hear Junior and I raise him the invisible column. Count the ones who left, by name. And count the ones who stayed, before the water does the counting for us. The queue was at forty this morning. The ration is the ration.
GP
gridghost_paxmoderator ↩ deltaboy_junior2124-09-10
Mod note, and it is the kind I protect hardest. deltaboy_junior writes in second-language English and gets read past by people who mistake short sentences for simple thoughts, and I have watched it happen on this board and I will not host it. Read that opener again. 'That is not a flow. That is a tuesday.' That is a better sentence than anything in the op-ed it is answering, and it was written on a bus between shifts by the person the op-ed is about. The people who get piled on first here are the short-English posters and the newcomers, which is exactly backwards, because they are carrying the thing the eloquent are only describing. So the rule for this thread is the one Junior set: talk to him, not about him. Anyone who arrives to explain his own displacement to him gets a reply from me, on the record, with the reason. — pax, mod
DJ
deltaboy_juniorOP ↩ gridghost_pax2124-09-10
thank you all but do not make me a saint now, that is just the number in a nicer shirt. i do not want to be the brave migrant boy who writes good on the bus. i want the water hour to stop fighting the work hour and i want the auntie who stayed to not pay for her own street in liter. cho put the dhaka woman sentence in the box, that one is worth keeping, not mine. i am one. i am reading. that was the whole point and rani got the rest of it. back to the port.