Love for Foreigners and Other Foolish Flights of Fancy
by AUDREY SHIPP
in Spring 2018
Claes Gabriel, Man With Turban, 2018
If you fall in love with an African in Los Angeles, you may be setting yourself up for failure. Failure of international proportions. Despite the fact that his skin is darkly beautiful soft and reckons you back to your own pre-slavery African past. Despite his Parisian French, his native dialect that you cannot comprehend and his education at one of California’s most esteemed public universities. Despite his ability to kiss you into dimensions of memorization of another love on a wet Parisian night in a now forgotten arrondissement up three flights of tightly wound stairs to a borrowed bed on borrowed time. His lips are perfect, his nose perfect, and his eyebrows heavy with Western learning and a love for his land. Perhaps bigger, yes bigger, than his love for you—or me—is his love for his people.
So. Even though you walk the Miracle Mile—Wilshire all the way to Beverly Hills—on a summer night hand in hand and you wish and hope and dream as you pass the bolted bank buildings and as the evening’s stragglers and enamored couples laughingly exit the closing restaurants, there may be no future there. No eternal us, no eternal we. Just this moment in time that comes back hauntingly in a nostalgic mental game of what if.
His history was not the history of the ragtag Original Forty-Four, the pobladores, who founded Los Angeles, with the twenty-six Afro-Mexicans amongst them. Like glitter dispersed in history. His life, not the searching down of Black American landmarks such as this former nightclub, now a discount store or that church on South Central Avenue which is now boarded up. Neighborhoods as tokens such as the Black Eastside to which Blacks working on the Westside were forced to retreat by sundown. Today’s neighborhoods of Leimert Park, West Adams, Jefferson Park, Watts, or Little Ethiopia. The present eight percent. We were too small to contain an African love when he had an entire continent, and his own country. Yet, here I am, so full of Africa, so richly African American centuries after the beating down of slavery, the institutionalization of deculturation and dispossession. Here I am, sitting in summer hot sun on a bus stop bench as three lanes of traffic move north and three south, head resting on the back of the bench, eyes closed to the sun, the whirl of traffic in my ears, waiting for redemption from the American experiment, swept up by empire, almost as far west as one could have wandered. Wondering.
The precariousness of love in Los Angeles. Of loveliness. Black loveliness. The precariousness of Black life. A result of Black migration and its discontents. The purpose being to move to the next place, the better place, even if that meant leaving essentials and essential people behind. Movement as priority. Movement in the forefront. Migration from the South, the Midwest. Not whole families. Usually the boldest. The most audacious. The individual who didn’t fit in. The military man. Leaving behind aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings. Parents. And for the migrants’ offspring, leaving behind those extended families that were historically precarious from the start. Leaving behind role models, senses of comfort, wells of support.
Famously, Los Angeles is an amalgam of cultures. African American. The original Native American. Mexican, Mexican-American. Chicano. Central American, Armenian. Euro-Americans of a varied sort who migrated from the East and Midwest. Their more-recent Russian counterparts. Iranians, Armenians, Korean, Filipinos. Quite the array.
If you fall in love with an African in Los Angeles, the love may not be as hoped or planned. It may not lead to eternal togetherness, the promises after the kisses, the thrill of a life or space together, cross-continental travel, off-spring, and the learning of a new dialect. None of that. In time, his land may call him home to a place to which in a few weeks he can readapt. Not like you, so full of memory of this place which was lost, that one left, that one which remains behind. You are memory. You are loss personified. In your gestures and sad smile in summer sun heat, at the bus stop with head reclining on the back of the bench, traffic whirling north, south. Everyone in a hurry. Everyone with somewhere else to go.
Born and continuing to reside in one of the most distant locations of the Great Migration, Audrey Shipp teaches in a public high school in Los Angeles. Amongst other topics, she aspires to bring to light the effects of migration on African-American culture while connecting her writing to the international Black Diaspora. She holds an M.Ed. and B.A. in English from UCLA and an M.A. in English from Cal State L.A.