The Color Purple

I wrote a poem while at the Juniper Writing Institute this summer regarding the color purple. It was an exercise based on listening to a poem of another writer and coming up with a response. The latest draft I have of it is below:

Viole(n)t

I am the color of fruit
in books for children
they draw me round
but my shape is much less
defined

at least there is no way
to draw a perfect circle.

I am the color of rage
when anger has long flown
past the horizon of the face,
the color of asphyxiation
and the color of royalty.

What does it mean when
a queen can wear me and be adored
or a skin can wrap itself in me
and become close to death?

To be both royalty and a moniker of death - purple can evoke different emotions based on the mindset you find yourself in. It also makes me think about living in a purple region.

I see as many Trump signs on my neighborhood walk as I do Harris signs. The political landscape of this region is as much as circle as it is an oval - squint hard enough and you’ll see one or the other, but undefined when taken as a whole.

In a given day, I’ve had my landlord tell me he’s chewed out a guy for saying weird shit (“That one was born a woman” with a tone of derision when pointing in my direction) as well as getting asked whether or not I “transported minors to other states for ‘transgender surgeries’.”

The latter is what I wanted to focus on. Because, in this case, it was a genuine question asked to me by someone who said in the same breath that “we won’t go back to working at a house where [you] feel uncomfortable.”

She had already expressed to me her support and said that as my boss she only wants me to be happy…and that it breaks her heart when “mommas don’t love their kids, regardless of how they identify.”

All sentiments that I’d want from a relative stranger.

And yet, when I asked her where she heard about the ‘transgender surgeries on minors’ nonsense, her response was, “My brother’s wife is in politics and that’s what she told me. I’m apolitical and just want people to live how they want without telling me I need to live in their way.”

In a violent political landscape, where we have a clear fascist on one side and someone who’s going to give us more of the same (something something broken two-party system), the presidential race is ultimately going to be decided by people like my boss.

She’s been open with me about her life - her high school graduating class was less than 50 people. She’s only eight years older than me but has a 20-year-old child and three other younger ones, the youngest still a toddler. My boss didn’t go to college, married the man she met at 14, didn’t leave her hometown. Where we’re working is essentially the same region she grew up.

In the area I live now, this is common. People get sucked in and don’t leave. My partner and I, upon our arrival, were known by almost everyone in town (and nearby) and who our landlord was. At one point, in a park at the next town over, we were approached by a well-meaning, middle-aged woman about whether she saw us in the city that previous weekend.

“You see,” she said with a nervous giggle, gesturing with her hands to mime our height difference, “it’s rare to see a guy shorter than his girlfriend. Welcome to the area!”

(I’ll leave you to unpack that and move on.)

In addition to not leaving, it should be clarified that plenty of people (like my boss) can’t leave. There’s nowhere for them to go, nothing they can afford. So they stay in the fishbowl of rural America.

The vague snippets of excitement - like a visibly unusual couple moving to town - is about as much as they get from a country that’s basically forgotten about them. Indeed, my boss and people like her that I’ve met are, on the face, wholly uninterested in politics and are eager to absorb whatever “professional politicians” tell them.

Indeed, why shouldn’t we believe what professional politicians tell us? You’d think that, again on the face, that this would be completely reasonable, especially to someone like my boss who works wild hours and has four kids at home to take care of on her own.

This was something I recently came around to as a perspective shift; I used to think this readiness to believe was ridiculous and reflective of how “dumb” Americans were generally. However, I realized over time that this was classist thinking. I was able to afford a state school and get a college degree. I was able to live at least two hours away from my parents and meet other people who thought differently than me. It helped me grow. So many folks, due to the way rural areas act like sand pits, don’t get this.

It isn’t limited to just rural areas, though. I’ve seen it in suburbs and cities too. In addition to grinding away under abusive capitalist conditions that take away the ability to critically engage with politics, there’s a fear of seeming unintelligent, and a lack of self-confidence because people think they need to be “knowledgeable” to even broach politics.

As a result of this, there’s a whole swath of people who could have very strong opinions about topics that are being debated (abortion being the most readily available in my mind), but no outlet to learn about it in a way that doesn’t make them feel like shit for not understanding the so-called “complexities” surrounding the matter.

I should be clear that it’s not that I think those outlets don’t exist. I’m just not seeing them engage the people who might need them most in the area I live in, which by the way, has extremely limited connectivity. To write things like this, I have to go to the library and get WiFi because my hotspot doesn’t have enough strength to do a git push to the repo for this website.

So: capitalist grind, busy family life, lack of resources (including reliable internet)…how do we reach these voters in a way that doesn’t feel alienating or insulting?

At least on my end of things, I’ve resolved to just start talking to my neighbors more about politics in a casual and friendly manner whenever possible. Even though I don’t believe in patriotism or electoral processes in this country, I am voting to keep my loved ones alive.

I spent a good hour talking with my boss about transgender rights and ideas, which helped bring her down from the ledge of thinking people like me helped perform illegal surgeries on children. We didn’t agree on everything in the end, but we were able to get to a place where she agreed that the whole premise of illegal surgeries was far-fetched and silly.

Purple comes in many shades after all, and that’s okay.