Tag: Michael Lapointe

88. Garnette Cadogan, “Walking While Black”

cadogan

(image source: https://mlkscholars.mit.edu/event/garnette-cadogan-how-walking-while-black-reveals-possibilities-and-limitations/)

Michael Lapointe seems to suggest that Garnette Cadogan’s essay, “Walking While Black,” should have been included in Duncan Minshull’s anthology Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking (one of the books Lapointe discusses in his recent review essay). “[J]ust how radical is the writer-walker resurgence that Minshull hoped for 20 years ago and has watched come to pass?” Lapointe asks. “Like protesting, walking ought to be among the most democratic of activities. Look closely at the genre, though, and you’ll find that the writer-walker has a way of claiming a surprisingly exclusive status” (Lapointe). That’s true of women who walk and write; they have to be careful about walking after dark. And it’s true of Cadogan, whose encounters with police officers and white racists make walking dangerous. Cadogan’s essay, Lapointe writes, “asks us to consider how a literary creation can germinate on a stroll when ‘the sidewalk [is] a minefield’” (qtd. in Lapointe).

Cadogan’s essay begins in childhood, when he began to love walking. His violent stepfather made it safer to be out of the house—not that the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, were safe. Indeed, they “were often terrifying—you could, for instance, get killed if a political henchman thought you came from the wrong neighborhood, or even if you wore the wrong color,” since certain colors were associated with specific political parties: “The wrong color in the wrong neighborhood could mean your last day” (Cadogan). It’s not surprising, then, that Cadogan’s friends “and the rare nocturnal passerby” called him crazy for taking “long late-night walks that traversed warring political zones” (Cadogan).

Those walks had a powerful effect on Cadogan. They changed his character: “I made friends with strangers and went from being a very shy and awkward kid to being an extroverted, awkward one” (Cadogan). He learned about navigating the streets from beggars, vendors, and poor laborers. “I imagined myself as a Jamaican Tom Sawyer,” he writes, “one moment sauntering down the streets to pick low-hanging mangoes that I could reach from the sidewalk, another moment hanging outside a street party with battling sound systems, each armed with speakers piled to create skyscrapers of heavy bass” (Cadogan). The streets weren’t frightening; they were full of adventure. Sometimes he walked with others who had missed the last bus, or he would lose himself in “Mittyesque” fantasies (Cadogan). “Walking became so regular and familiar that the way home became home,” he recalls (Cadogan). He learned the rules of the Kingston streets and mapped the city’s “complex, and often bizarre, cultural and political and social activity” (Cadogan). The nighttime streets were too dangerous for women to walk alone, he acknowledges, but Cadogan walked everywhere, through rich neighborhoods and poor ones, “cutting across Jamaica’s deep social divisions” (Cadogan).

In 1996, Cadogan moved to New Orleans to go to college. He wanted to explore that city on foot, and when university staff warned him about the city’s crime rate, he decided to ignore their concerns, because Kingston’s crime rate was much higher. “What no one had told me was that I was the one who would be considered a threat,” he writes. “I wasn’t prepared for any of this. I had come from a majority-black country in which no one was wary of me because of my skin color. Now I wasn’t sure who was afraid of me” (Cadogan). The police were a particular problem: “They regularly stopped and bullied me, asking questions that took my guilt for granted” (Cadogan). He quickly had to figure out how to survive those interactions, mentioning that he was a college student or accidentally pulling out his student ID when asked for his driver’s license. However, he continues, 

[i]n this city of exuberant streets, walking became a complex and often oppressive negotiation. . . . New Orleans suddenly felt more dangerous than Jamaica. The sidewalk was a minefield, and every hesitation and self-censored compensation reduced my dignity. Despite my best efforts, the streets never felt comfortably safe. Even a simple salutation was suspect. (Cadogan)

One night, he recalls, he waved to a passing cop: “Moments later, I was against his car in handcuffs” (Cadogan). When he asked why, he was told, “No one waves to the police” (Cadogan). His friends saw his behaviour as absurd: “‘Now why would you do a dumb thing like that?’ asked one. ‘You know better than to make nice with police’” (Cadogan).

Cadogan leaves New Orleans to visit his dying grandmother in Kingston right before Hurricane Katrina. “I hadn’t wandered those streets in eight years, since my last visit, and I returned to them now mostly at night, the time I found best for thinking, praying, crying,” he writes. “I walked to feel less alienated—from myself, struggling with the pain of seeing my grandmother terminally ill; from my home in New Orleans, underwater and seemingly abandoned; from my home country, which now, precisely because of its childhood familiarity, felt foreign to me” (Cadogan). He is surprised at how safe the streets felt: 

once again one black body among many, no longer having to anticipate the many ways my presence might instill fear and how to offer some reassuring body language. . . . I could be invisible in Jamaica in a way I can’t be invisible in the United States. Walking had returned to me a greater set of possibilities. (Cadogan).

Those possibilities are, he continues, the purpose of walking:

Following serendipity, I added new routes to the mental maps I had made from constant walking in that city from childhood to young adulthood, traced variations on the old pathways. Serendipity, a mentor once told me, is a secular way of speaking of grace; it’s unearned favor. Seen theologically, then, walking is an act of faith. Walking is, after all, interrupted falling. We see, we listen, we speak, and we trust that each step we take won’t be our last, but will lead us to a richer understanding of the self and the world. (Cadogan)

“In Jamaica, I felt once again as if the only identity that mattered was my own, not the constricted one that others had constructed for me,” he continues. “I strolled into my better self. I said, along with Kierkegaard, ‘I have walked myself into my best thoughts’” (Cadogan).

When Cadogan tried to return to New Orleans a month later, there were no flights, and his aunt encourages him to stay with her in New York instead. “This wasn’t a hard sell,” he writes:

I wanted to be in a place where I could travel by foot and, more crucially, continue to reap the solace of walking at night. And I was eager to follow in the steps of the essayists, poets, and novelists who’d wandered the great city before me—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Alfred Kazin, Elizabeth Hardwick. I had visited the city before, but each trip had felt like a tour in a sports car. I welcomed the chance to stroll. I wanted to walk alongside Whitman’s ghost and “descend to the pavements, merge with the crowd, and gaze with them.” (Cadogan)

He explores the city, from the West Village to his home in the Bronx, to Queens and Brooklyn: “The city was my playground” (Cadogan). He walks with a woman he had started dating: “My impressions of the city took shape during my walks with her” (Cadogan). “The city was beguiling, exhilarating, vibrant,” he writes. “But it wasn’t long before reality reminded me I wasn’t invulnerable, especially when I walked alone” (Cadogan). One night in the East Village, a white man punches him because “he’d merely assumed I was a criminal because of my race” (Cadogan). In addition, the “mutual distrust” between Cadogan and the police “was impossible to ignore” (Cadogan). “I returned to the old rules I’d set for myself in New Orleans, with elaboration,” he recalls: no running, no sudden movements, no hoodies, no objects in his hand, no waiting for friends on street corners (Cadogan). “As comfort set in,” though, “inevitably I began to break some of those rules, until a night encounter sent me zealously back to them, having learned that anything less than vigilance was carelessness” (Cadogan).

While jogging up the sidewalk, late to meet friends, Cadogan is approached by a police officer with a gun in his hand. “In no time, half a dozen cops were upon me, chucking me against the car and tightly handcuffing me,” he recalls (Cadogan). They ask a barrage of questions and Cadogan can’t answer them all. He tries to focus on one officer. That doesn’t work: “the others got frustrated that I wasn’t answering them fast enough and barked at me” (Cadogan). Nothing he did made any difference. “For a black man, to assert your dignity before the police was to risk assault,” he writes: 

In fact, the dignity of black people meant less to them, which was why I always felt safer being stopped in front of white witnesses than black witnesses. The cops had less regard for the witness and entreaties of black onlookers, whereas the concern of white witnesses usually registered on them. A black witness asking a question or politely raising an objection could quickly become a fellow detainee. (Cadogan)

Eventually a police captain tells the others to let Cadogan go. “Humiliated, I tried not to make eye contact with the onlookers on the sidewalk, and I was reluctant to pass them to be on my way,” he recalls (Cadogan). The police captain offers to drop him off at a subway station. “‘It’s because you were polite that we let you go,’” he tells Cadogan. “‘If you were acting up it would have been different.’” Cadogan nods and says nothing.

“I realized that what I least liked about walking in New York City wasn’t merely having to learn new rules of navigation and socialization—every city has its own,” Cadogan states. “It was the arbitrariness of the circumstances that required them, an arbitrariness that made me feel like a child again, that infantilized me” (Cadogan). “On many walks,” he continues, “I ask white friends to accompany me, just to avoid being treated like a threat,” although in New Orleans, walking with a white woman attracts more hostility (Cadogan). “Walking while black restricts the experience of walking, renders inaccessible the classic Romantic experience of walking alone,” Cadogan continues:

It forces me to be in constant relationship with others, unable to join the New York flâneurs I had read about and hoped to join. Instead of meandering aimlessly in the footsteps of Whitman, Melville, Kazin, and Vivian Gornick, more often I felt I was tiptoeing in Baldwin’s. . . . Walking as a black man has made me feel simultaneously more removed from the city, in my awareness that I am perceived as suspect, and more closely connected to it, in the full attentiveness demanded by my vigilance. It has made me walk more purposefully in the city, becoming part of its flow, rather than observing, standing apart. (Cadogan)

But this also means that he’s not at home in the city. Nor is he at home as a pedestrian: “Walking—the simple, monotonous act of placing one foot before the other to prevent falling—turns out not to be so simple if you’re black. Walking alone has been anything but monotonous for me; monotony is a luxury” (Cadogan). 

More than anything else, Cadogan concludes, “[w]e want the freedom and pleasure of walking without fear—without others’ fear—wherever we choose” (Cadogan). He has now lived for ten years in New York, and he continues walking its streets, which “has made it closer to home to me” (Cadogan). But at the same time, it’s not home, because “the city also withholds itself from me via those very streets. I walk them, alternately invisible and too prominent. So I walk caught between memory and forgetting, between memory and forgiveness” (Cadogan).

Cadogan offers a powerful account of the possibilities and realities of walking for a black man in a racist society. There’s no question that walking is easier for some than for others. As a white, straight, cis-gendered man, I don’t face the same racism that Cadogan and many others face. That is part of my unearned privilege; I acknowledge that. What to do about it, though, is another matter. I just don’t know. I don’t feel that I can do much about the racism of other white people (I’m unlikely to witness it) nor about the racism of police officers. Emma Battell Lowman and Adam J. Barker, and Clare Land, argue that it’s important to do something about white privilege. Land, for instance, argues that one also has “to consider ways to undo it,” to try to unlearn it and to be cognizant of it (31)—although it seems to me that there is a great gulf between awareness of white privilege and undoing it. Lowman and Barker are, I think, more realistic than Land in their discussion of “Settler privilege”:

As Settler Canadians, we are part of a colonizing collective, and there is no simple place we can go, or declaration we can make, that will sever us from our unearned benefits and privileges, insulate us from our fears of change, or abstract us from destructive practices on the land. No matter how hard it may be to envision, it is possible to forge different relationships to the land that are not rooted in the displacement and genocide of Indigenous nations, nor in fooling ourselves with the comfortable oblivion of indigenization and transcendence. (109)

And yet, they argue that collective action can, somehow, make change happen (109-10). It’s not clear to me, though, what kind of collective action could make the Garnette Cadogan’s walking experiences any easier, any less fraught. Perhaps some group walk, like a “Take Back the Night” event, focused on racism? I don’t know. I am sure, though, that I’m not the one to organize such an event. At the same time, though, I don’t think that for me to stay home, to abandon walking, as a way of pretending that my privilege doesn’t exist is the answer, either. That privilege will carry on whether I’m sitting at home or trudging down a grid road or along a sidewalk. So I feel caught between shock and sorrow at Cadogan’s experience, which I know is shared by many others, and a feeling of being helpless to do anything about it.

Works Cited

Cadogan, Garnette. “Walking While Black.” Literary Hub, 8 July 2016, https://lithub.com/walking-while-black/.

Land, Clare. Decolonizing Solidarity: Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles, Zed, 2015.

Lapointe, Michael. “The Unbearable Smugness of Walking.” The Atlantic, August 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/how-walking-became-pedestrian-duncan-minshull-erling-kagge-walking/592792/.

Lowman, Emma Battell, and Adam J. Barker. Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada, Fernwood, 2015.

86. Erling Kagge, Walking: One Step at a Time

erling kagge

Ironically, I read about Erling Kagge’s Walking: One Step at a Time during our recent walking holiday, in a review essay by Michael Lapointe that concludes with some skepticism (to say the least) about the liberating or critical possibilities of walking. Lapointe’s skepticism is well-taken, but I wanted to follow up on his sources, so I ordered a copy of Kagge’s book, which was waiting for me when we returned home.

Walking: One Step at a Time is a collection of stories about and meditations on walking. Its fragmentary structure means that every summary of the text—every attempt at identifying what’s worth thinking about in it—is going to be very different. I found a couple of key themes during my reading, which would probably be different were I to read it again. One of those themes is the idea that walking is part of being human. “Placing one foot in front of the other, investigating and overcoming are intrinsic to our nature. Journeys of discovery are not something you start doing, but something you gradually stop doing,” Kagge writes (5). He is thinking about his grandmother, who, he says started to die the day she could no longer walk, and his daughter learning to walk and thereby explore her world. Although we all have different reasons for walking, it is “one of the most important things we do,” he writes (9). The book ends on a similar note, but on a grander evolutionary scale:

Homo sapiens didn’t invent bipedalism. It was the other way around. Australopithecus, our forefathers, had already been walking for over two million years when our particular species came into being. Everything that we do today, that which separates us from other species, can be traced back to our origins of walking. 

The ability to walk, to put one foot in front of the other, invented us. (157)

Certainly there are other defining elements of being human, and the ability to walk is by no means universal, but walking upright is one of the characteristics of our species.

Another theme is Kagge’s own walking; in a way, this book is a walking autobiography. Near the beginning of the book, he writes,

I have no idea how many walks I’ve been on. 

I’ve been on short walks; I’ve been on long walks. I’ve walked from villages and to cities. I’ve walked through the day and through the night, from lovers and to friends. I have walked in deep forests and over big mountains, across snow-covered plains and through urban jungles. I have walked bored and euphoric and I have tried to walk away from problems. I have walked in pain and in happiness. But no matter where and why, I have walked and walked. I have walked to the ends of the world—literally. 

All my walks have been different, but looking back I see one common denominator: inner silence. Walking and silence belong together. Silence is as abstract as walking is concrete. (8)

Not surprisingly, Kagge’s first book was called Silence. His suggestion that walking and silence go together indicates that he is primarily interested in walking alone; if he were walking with others, those walks would be defined by conversation rather than silence, I think.

Kagge is particularly interested in what happens when he walks, in his experience of walking, particularly the tricks he finds walking playing with his experience of time:

Everything moves more slowly when I walk, the world seems softer and for a short while I am not doing household chores, having meetings or reading manuscripts. A free man possesses time. The opinions, expectations and moods of family, colleagues and friends all become unimportant for a few minutes or a few hours. Walking, I become the centre of my own life, while completely forgetting myself shortly afterwards. (15)

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that one saves time travelling only two hours from one point to another instead of spending eight hours on the same journey,” he continues. “While this holds up mathematically, my experience is the opposite: time passes more quickly when I increase the speed of travel. My speed and time accelerate in parallel. It is as if the duration of a single hour becomes less than a clock-hour. When I am in a rush, I hardly pay attention to anything at all” (15). He compares driving to a mountain with walking to a mountain: “If you were to walk along the same route, however—spending an entire day instead of a half-hour, breathing more easily, listening, feeling the ground beneath your feet, exerting yourself—the day becomes something else entirely”—that is, something other than “one big blur”:

Little by little, the mountain looms up before you and your surroundings seem to grow larger. Becoming acquainted with these surroundings takes time. It’s like building a friendship. The mountain up ahead, which slowly changes as you draw closer, feels like an intimate friend by the time you’ve arrived. Your eyes, ears, nose, shoulders, stomach and legs speak to the mountain, and the mountain replies. Time stretches out, independent of minutes and hours. 

And this is precisely the secret held by all those who go on foot: life is prolonged when you walk. Walking expands time rather than collapses it. (16-17)

I’ve had similar experiences walking toward grain elevators (which indicate a town or village where I might be able to get a cold drink), but for me, it’s often an experience of frustration rather than anticipation—perhaps because I really want to get that cold drink and find a place to sit and rest. Kagge points out that in Robert Wilson’s performance piece, Walking, he and his audience take five hours to cross a Dutch island, Terschelling, a walk that typically would only take 45 minutes, and as a result, they become more aware of their surroundings; their slow speed alters their perceptions (77). “So much in our lives is fast-paced,” Kagge writes. “Walking is a slow undertaking. It is among the most radical things you can do” (19). Perhaps it’s that kind of claim that irritates Lapointe; however, it strikes me that the deliberate slowness of walking does interrupt our culture’s belief in efficiency and time management, and that therefore it is, or can be thought of, as a radical act.

Kagge is also interested in the cognitive effects of walking—the way it helps him think, and more generally, the connection between walking and thinking. “Walking sometimes means undertaking an inner voyage of discovery,” he writes. “You are shaped by buildings, faces, signs, weather and the atmosphere. . . . Walking as a combination of movement, humility, balance, curiosity, smell, sound, light and—if you walk far enough—longing. A feeling which reaches for something, without finding it” (28). Walking is both anarchic and ordering:

Walking, I can stop whenever I feel like it. Take a look around. And then continue on. It’s a small-scale anarchy: the thoughts that stream through my mind or the anxieties that I sense in my body shift and clear up as I walk. Chaos is king when I first strike out on my walk, but as I arrive, things have become more orderly, even when I haven’t given a thought to the chaos as I’ve walked along. (29)

Moreover, because walking involves the body, it becomes an opportunity for a kind of embodied cognition: 

The feet are in dialogue with your eyes, nose, arms, torso, and with your emotions, This dialogue often takes place so fast that the mind is unable to keep up. Our feet help us to proceed with precision. They can read the terrain, and also what hits them from underneath the soles; they process each impression, in order to take one step forward or one to the side. (58)

This leads Kagge to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s contention, from The Phenomenology of Perception: “You think with your entire self” (74-75). According to Kagge, Merleau-Ponty 

started with the assumption that the body is not merely a collection of atoms made of flesh and bone. We are able to perceive and care for our memories and reflections with our toes, feet, legs, arms, stomachs, chests and shoulders. . . . Merleau-Ponty understood something that neurologists and psychologists have since begun to study: everything around us is something with which the whole of you and I are able to have a running dialogue. . . . When we see, smell and listen, we are—in order to understand our experience—using the information that has already been stored inside our bodies. (75)

The Phenomenology of Perception is on my reading list, and Kagge’s brief discussion of that text reaffirms my need to read it.

Kagge also argues that walking helps him (and others) think. He attributes the phrase “solvitur ambulando,” “it is solved by walking,” to Diogenes, not St. Augustine (86), and provides a list of people who have used walking as an aid to thinking: Darwin, Kierkegaard, Einstein, Steve Jobs, Thoreau (86-87). “When I walk my thoughts are set free,” he writes. “My blood circulates and, if I choose a faster pace, my body takes in more oxygen. My head clears” (87). As a result, he argues that one can actually walk away from one’s problems—or, at least, that he does:

I walk away from my problems. Not all of them, but as many as possible. Don’t we all? Some of my problems fade away as I walk. They might vanish within an hour, or a few days. Perhaps they weren’t as big as I had imagined? It’s often like that. Something that I view as problematic, that stirs me up, turns out not to be so troublesome or important, after all, once I have gained some distance from it. (109)

The idea that walking helps people think is relatively common, and psychologists have experimental data that suggest the connection isn’t just anecdotal.

Walking, for Kagge, is also about discomfort—but discomfort as something to be embraced rather than avoided. He reports that, in her book RAIN: Four Walks in English Weather, Melissa Harrison tells a story about her father, who encouraged her to rise above bad weather and exhaustion: that advice wasn’t meant to be “macho,” Kagge argues, but was “lovingly bestowed” in the hope that she “would have the chance to experience as many wonderful things in the wild as they themselves had. Our need for comfort not only implies that we avoid uncomfortable experiences but it also means that we lose out on many good ones” (96-97). He reflects on his expeditions to the Poles and to Mount Everest—Kagge is (at least sometimes) an epic or heroic walker, although he would probably reject such terms; he says that he was never a great athlete but able “to complete long walking trips on skis”—therefore skiing trips?—because he prepared well and he tried (155)—and the pleasure of making do with as little as possible, which could be considered an embracing of discomfort: 

It’s possible to leave behind a whole slew of habits when you go for a long hike. There is pleasure in considering what you actually need. In having to decide between the things that you must bring along and those that you only want to bring because they might constitute a comfort. I have the impression that most people underestimate the amount of time that they would be able to make do with nothing more than a sleeping bag, an extra warm jacket, a small pan, a stove, matches and enough food. If you say it’s impossible to survive with so little, and I say that it is possible, we are both probably right. (99)

Some of his greatest pleasures have involved getting warm after being cold (99). He also likes the way that long walks change his relation to the world: “If a walk lasts for many hours or days, it takes on a different character than one that lasts for only half an hour. Your dependence on external stimuli decreases, you are torn away from the expectations of others, and your walk takes on a more internal character” (119).

In fact, he enjoys walking until he has exhausted himself: 

What I like most of all is to walk until I nearly collapse. To sense the pleasure, the exhaustion and the absurdity of walking all blending together, until I can no longer tell what is what. My head changes. I don’t care what time it is, my head is devoid of all thought, and I become a part of the grass, the stones, the moss, the flowers and the horizon. (134-36)

Breaking himself down physically is “a nice change from everyday life”: “To concentrate and to be disrupted are not opposites. Both are always present to various degrees, but if you have been broken down, you no longer have the same strength to be disrupted” (136). Exhaustion changes his perception of his surroundings: “When my strength is reduced, I no longer have the resources to think about much, and that’s when the smells, the sounds and the ground seem to draw much closer to my experience. It’s as if my senses open to their surroundings. Nature is transformed” (136). “The longer I walk,” he continues, “the less I differentiate between my body, my mind and my surroundings. The external and internal worlds overlap. I am no longer an observer looking at nature, but the entirety of my body is involved” (137). This takes him back to Merleau-Ponty, I think, and the notion that one’s entire body is engaged in the thinking that happens during a walk. For my part, I don’t like walking until I’m exhausted, but I have noticed that sometimes, when I’m getting tired–in the second half of a long hike, for instance–my mind becomes quiet and the experience of the walk changes, becoming more meditative or sensory. There is a transformation, I think, similar to the one Kagge describes here.

Is Kagge’s book useful for my project? I’m not sure. The reminder about the importance of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology was helpful, and the fact that Kagge is proudly an epic or heroic walker, interested in what happens during walks that cover long distances and take place over long durations, might be important if I ever do write an essay entitled “In Defence of Epic Walking.” His claims about the radical nature of walking, despite Lapointe’s skepticism about them, are probably worth exploring further. So yes, I think it was worth reading, and I’m happy I ran across Lapointe’s review essay, because I might not have learned about Walking: One Step at a Time otherwise.

Work Cited

Kagge, Erling. Walking: One Step at a Time, translated by Becky L. Crook, Pantheon, 2019.

Lapointe, Michael. “The Unbearable Smugness of Walking.” The Atlantic, August 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/how-walking-became-pedestrian-duncan-minshull-erling-kagge-walking/592792/. Accessed 4 August 2019.