Letter From The Staff – November 2020
In August, as part of a series on resilience, The New York Times ran author Jami Attenberg’s essay “Is Resilience Overrated?” In the article, Attenberg writes about how her fellow New Orleanians, celebrated for their resilience during the Hurricane Katrina disaster, have come to despise the word. Should the responsibility for resilience have been theirs in the first place, or should it have been the obligation of those who were elected and paid to represent their interests?
Attenberg finds that those who have shown the greatest resilience regard it skeptically as a fetishization. By focusing in our first issue of Paper Dragon on recovery and resilience, were we perpetuating a narrative by which those in power could wash their hands of the less fortunate, all while continuing to exploit them?
The fact is, right or wrong, many of us have had to buckle down, bootstrap, or get by in this year of changes. Maybe not to the extent of the Katrina survivors, or communities grappling with the horrific murders of George Floyd and Walter Wallace, Jr., or the incarcerated contributors to our “COVID on the Inside” package who are living and dying through the pandemic in an 8-by-10-foot cell, or immigrant families struggling to find work amidst bigotry and the economic shutdown, but in our own irrepressible ways.
The over 650 people who sent us their stories or visions of recovery and resilience in just the handful of months we were open for submissions exemplified this. Of those hundreds, we’re proud to share our selections, like Chuck Teixeira’s COVID-era character study; Athira Unni and Jennifer Schomburg Kanke’s contemporary feminism; William Doreski’s heartrending optimism in incremental, personal change; Allan Lake’s sense of humor in the face of death; Dorothy Spears’ vanishing memory juxtaposed against Steven Bailey’s all-too-present mind, and facing paranoia through a pandemic.
A few weeks ago, the United States showed its own resilience in the face of radical, right-wing militias, fascist attacks on our most vulnerable citizens, obstructionist government officials, outright racism, and, of course, a global pandemic. We voted. We voted in record numbers. We voted to reset the course of our country. During her victory speech, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris—the first woman, the first black person, the first person of Southeast Asian descent to be elected to the office—reminded us of Congressman John Lewis’ sentiment about democracy: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.”
Similarly, resilience and recovery are not fixed states. They are not things we achieve. They are things we work at each hour, each day. The Latin root “re” necessitates something else: a previous condition, a connection to others, a doubling down. “Re” words do not merely exist. They are a process. With nearly half of all American voters having continued to endorse President Trump’s Muslim bans, child separation at the border, inaction on COVID, and tax plans benefitting only the wealthiest Americans, we must commit to the ongoing process of creating a culture reflective of our country’s highest ideals.
We hope that this first volume of the Paper Dragon does not fetishize resilience and recovery, but inspires it. Much like the election a few weeks ago, we hope it rejuvenates and reinvigorates our readers to work toward recovery and to practice resilience, no matter what the future holds. During the difficult and stressful days of the past few weeks, it was your work and talent that kept us going, and we hope it provides the same boost to all of our readers.