Root Shock. Mindy Thompson Fullilove
In fact, the injury from root shock may be even more enduring than a burn, as it can affect generations and generations of people. Noah’s ark—and his effort to rebuild the world after the flood—is the true story of a lost world. We keep telling that story because we keep living it, not simply when the floods come, but after they have receded and we try to rebuild.
Carlos Peterson, a resident of the Lower Hill, was deeply affected by the bulldozing of his neighborhood. He related, “I remember being able to look from the third floor and actually see the bulldozers and the destruction of where we once lived. This urban renewal process was preparation for Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena. I was young and did not fully understand what was happening. I only knew this process was coming towards us. Coupled with the sense of personal loss of friends and neighborhood, this event had quite an influence on my life.” As an adult, he gained a deeper understanding of the process that continued to destroy the neighborhood. It was with a sense of increasing urgency that he sought to document what was happening around him. The photograph shown here depicts the bulldozing in the area of Crawford Street, with the dome of the Civic Arena in the background, and exposed tree roots in the foreground. The disrupted context, exterior to the individual and the group, is the fundamental process that engenders root shock.
Fig. 1.1. Carlos F. Peterson. “Hill-o-Phobia.” Carlos Peterson took this photograph after the bulldozing of a section of the Lower Hill. It shows the Civic Arena just behind the tree root. It is an image of the world torn apart that we will revisit in the work of other artists. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.
Carlos Peterson worked, as well, to depict the emotional impact the environmental devastation had on him. “I decided to express my feeling using drawings and photography. . . . I decided to look at my surroundings from a grassroots level, with the perspective of knowing how such conditions made me feel. My impression was that we were like a bunch of nomads always fleeing, that was the feeling I had.
“When creating my drawings I attempted to look at a building from within, and the structure’s exterior. I would go into a vacant structure and photograph how it was, allowing memories of my experience to influence art. I would seek to tie in my impressions of what it would feel like had I been the last resident. Therefore, I would end up with a lot of stretched and distorted images that I thought reflected the economics in a downtrodden neighborhood.”
In “Stream of Consciousness,” the drawing shown here, the isolated buildings, open grave, and looming cross create a landscape of loss. The artist has placed his profile among the doomed buildings on the horizon. A dressmaker’s model and a fallen stop sign are poignant reminders that this world once worked and moved and meant something to the people who lived in it. Thus, Carlos Peterson attempts to reveal the texture and content of the painful emotions that accompany root shock.
“This drawing contains symbolism that characterized my state of mind during the time when the Hill District was at its lowest ebb. My drawings were my therapy through the smothering depression that came with the area’s carcass-like landscape. During that time I saw contradiction between religion and nature. Man-made structures and man always succumb to nature no matter how strong man’s faith, prayer, or objects. . . . Nature renews itself through death and dying. With this realization, I included my profile near the horizon just beyond the fence, upper right.”
Root shock, at the level of the individual, is a profound emotional upheaval that destroys the working model of the world that had existed in the individual’s head.6 Root shock undermines trust, increases anxiety about letting loved ones out of one’s sight, destabilizes relationships, destroys social, emotional, and financial resources, and increases the risk for every kind of stress-related disease, from depression to heart attack. Root shock leaves people chronically cranky, barking a distinctive croaky complaint that their world was abruptly taken away.
Root shock, at the level of the local community, be it neighborhood or something else, ruptures bonds, dispersing people to all the directions of the compass.7 Even if they manage to regroup, they are not sure what to do with one another. People who were near are too far, and people who were far are too near. The elegance of the neighborhood—each person in his social and geographic slot—is destroyed, and even if the neighborhood is rebuilt exactly as it was, it won’t work. The restored geography is not enough to repair the many injuries to the mazeway.8
Fig. 1.2. Carlos F. Peterson. “Stream of Consciousness.” In this drawing, Carlos Peterson included a series of images of loss and confusion, as he tried to make sense of the disintegration of the world around him. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.
Root shock, it is important to recognize, ripples out beyond those who are affected—in the way we like to measure these things. September 11 demonstrated our society’s great love for distinguishing an “affected” group that needs help from an “unaffected” group that doesn’t. While the “affected” people did need help, many more people were affected than was generally conceded. I was part of a call-in television show that aired just before the first anniversary of the attack. People from Queens or Staten Island called to say, “I feel bad, but nothing happened to me. It’s making me feel guilty.” I insisted, over and over again, that September 11 had happened to all of us and that the bad feeling was a natural reaction to having one’s city attacked by terrorists.
But root shock goes even further than one city, linking a local tragedy to events around the globe. During the 1950s and ’60s, a federal program called “urban renewal” destroyed hundreds of African American neighborhoods, many of which were home to jazz, a music that flowed through the communities from home to street to club. The young kids learning to play would linger outside the clubs to hear the music, dreaming of the day they might participate. Major chunks of the jazz world—the Fillmore in San Francisco, the Hill District in Pittsburgh, and the South Side of Chicago, among them—were torn up by urban renewal, and the structure of home-street-club was destroyed. Jazz nearly disappeared in the United States, surviving by dint of becoming an academic subject in high schools and colleges, played in a few austere clubs in New York and other big cities. The fact that the music endured had much to do with Europe and Japan, which offered performance sites where musicians might hone their craft and earn a living. Japan is now the top consumer of jazz CDs and Tokyo a “must stop” on a jazz ensemble’s touring schedule.
Tobias von Shöenebeck, a tour guide in Berlin, applied this principle of ripple effects on August 3, 2003, while watching fellow citizens participate in a new fad called “flash mob,” which had apparently originated in New York two months earlier. At the Berlin event, the flash mob, called together by email and cell phone, gathered in front of the American embassy to pop bottles of champagne, toast Natasha, and disperse. Von Shöenebeck shook his head, and muttered, “This is just the sort of thing that happens when you forbid New York to smoke.”9 He was referring to the implementation in April 2003 of tough new laws outlawing smoking in New York City bars and restaurants. While few might have made the connection between New York’s smoking laws and the fads that catch on in Berlin, it is exactly the kind of idea to which I am referring.
This lesson of interconnectedness is as hard to learn as differential calculus or quantum mechanics. The principle is simple: we—that is to say, all people—live in an emotional ecosystem that attaches us to the environment, not just as our individual selves, but as beings caught in a single, universal net of consciousness anchored in small niches we call neighborhoods or hamlets or villages. Because of the interconnectedness of the net, if your place is destroyed today, I will feel it hereafter.
Though a simple principle, it is hard to learn because the effects of root shock immediately get caught up in everything else that’s going on in the world. As the message moves around the world, it is possible to think of many other explanations for an initial cause. Imagine how many factors, other than New York City’s smoking laws, helped create the Berlin flash mob. The idea that your hurt has an effect on my life requires us to believe in “action at a distance,” which makes the average scientist