Iowa deserves parties, too.

In the bone thick silence of early morning, I listen to this Midwest state of corn and swine and farmer’s blood breathe. It is three weeks after the election and I am a black disabled mother in Iowa. Although I am not Iowan myself, my husband is, my child is, my family is. Although I am not Iowan, so many of the people I deeply love and who would lay in traffic for me are. I am half-Nigerian, a manifested dream of my father surviving Biafra and escaping to Canada so that he could eventually encounter my mother, whose own mother fled Haiti after my great-great grandfather disappeared during a dictator’s regime. It is in my family’s blood to run, but as I lie here in the deep thaw of Monday morning, I listen to the hum of that blood warming the vein. I contemplate its music and wonder whether I can be the one to rewrite it. I am not someone who runs. I no longer believe in the mythic power of flight. I am someone who stays. I am someone who fights.

I’ve been thinking for months about the words of Lyz Lenz, a very intelligent and savvy writer who lives in Iowa. She was writing about her latest book tour—she said, “Iowa deserves parties, too.” I have thought about the very public fight on social media when people didn’t want to attend the annual conference for the Association of Writers + Writing Programs in Kansas City. One person from Kansas wrote, why are we not good enough for you?

I have deep connections to Iowa. I went to Grinnell College, from 2009-2013. Some of my oldest, dearest friends are fifth generation Iowan farmers. The dad of one of my closest friends was the president of the Iowa Family Farm Coalition. He was interviewed in a documentary called Fresh. My undergrad years were spent in deep prairie. Dean Bakopoulos was my writing professor in my senior year. The last time I saw a friend alive who I dearly dearly love was in Iowa. He had just graduated, and he wrapped me in a bone-crumbling hug on our school’s campus lawn. Less than six weeks later, I found out that he died in Mexico City while working for the Associated Press. Mando was my friend, and was Dean’s student too. Fast forward six years and I land at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. I know this state and I don’t. I spend Tuesdays in workshop and one day a week out in Solon harvesting vegetables and working under the sun because that’s the Iowa I know and love. Writers of color in my graduate program laugh lightly at the spaghetti squash I haul into my house after a morning’s work of harvest. “I didn’t know black people ate those kinds of vegetables” someone joked to my face. I looked back at them, nonpluss, unsure of what to make of such a statement. I have lots of conflicting feelings about the Workshop, about the university, about how they say they’re a UNESCO City of Literature but there are some deeply classist, elitist currents running beneath the literary community in Iowa City. How Iowa seems to be at the heart of the literary world, and yet is a leaking valve, with all the blood flowing in and then leaking out as fast as they come. We come to write, and then leave to write about everything else besides the place that allowed us to find our voices in the first place. Fight for everything except the very thing that showed us how we could fight in the first place.

This is all to say: I care about Iowa as much as Lyz Lenz does. I agree with her: Iowa deserves book parties too. I read what Marilynne Robinson wrote about Iowa last year, about its transformation in the past 15 years, and how that seemed to fall into deaf ears because folks have deeply dismissive and regionalist impressions of which states “matter” and what is “America”. I remember the Iowa that Marilynne wrote of. I hold it close, remind myself that winter has come, but the summer of Iowa is something that feels close to God breathing in your ear, telling you to wake and greet the day. People forget it’s beauty. People underestimate its splendor. People don’t understand it’s history, it’s god damn confusing whiplash politics and laws when the truth is that Iowans are worth fighting for because once upon a time, it was one of the first states to wake up and fight for all of us. It’s time I fight for them, for my kid, for my family, because I don’t believe running works. I don’t believe what feels safe actually is. I feel that I must practice what folks in dialectic behavioral therapy call “opposite action” to reprogram myself if I want any sort of future for my kid worth having once they plant me in the ground. I am not fighting for me. I am fighting for my family’s future. We are not the worst things we’ve ever done. We are all worth saving or none of us are.

I was at the Socialism 2024 conference earlier this year run by Haymarket Books. A vendor at a table asked me where I was from. When I said Iowa, he said, oh I’m sorry, and then I just stared at him in silence. Sometimes in that silence I can…understand why people voted for Trump. I can…glimpse, taste that anger, that hurt, that sense of abandonment and fury of being told that you’re too far gone to save. I want to say, fuck you who said I need saving from you, or that you don’t need saving too? We all need to be saved. Nobody is on the top of the mountain getting the commandments. Nobody woke from a dream weaved by God. Love is the only god I truly know, dude.

I used to be a community organizer. I walked door to door in West Virginia and Virginia when I was 16 and 17, trying to talk to Americans about Barack because I wasn’t old enough to vote. I worked long hours in the heat but I also talked to people, ran from people, fought with people, did all the things we must do to keep this country running. I stopped doing that the minute Obama was elected. I was like, okay my work is done, let me go live my life now. It’s been over 15 years since that moment.

It’s time to be that scrappy young woman again.