Belonging: A Culture of Place Read Online Free PDF

intensely when I moved to New York City to further my career as a writer. During these years away from my native place, I often felt confusion and despair. My fundamentalist Christian upbringing had taught me to consider the meaning of sin as missing the mark. During those times in my life I often felt I was missing the mark, failing to live in accordance with the core values I believed should be the foundation of my identity. I struggled psychologically to repair the damages to my soul inflicted by my trespasses and those who trespassed against me.
    Becoming successful as a cultural critic and creative writer, away from my native place, I was consistently astounded when readers and reviewers who wrote about my work failed to mention the extent to which the culture of place I had known in Kentucky, shaped my writing and my vision. Surprised when the literary world did not acknowledge the significance of my Kentucky roots, I felt a greater necessity to articulate the role of homeplace in my artistic vision. Often critics would talk about my southern roots never naming a specific location for those roots. To some extent this failure to focus on Kentucky was linked to assumptions about whether Kentucky really was the “South.” I would tell people that growing up black in Kentucky we experienced our world as southern, as not very different from other southern places, like Alabama and Georgia. It may very well be that the culture of whiteness in Kentucky has characteristics that would not been seen as distinctly southern but certainly the subcultures black folks created and create were formed by the understanding of what it meant to be black people in the South. For all the talk about Kentucky as a border state, the culture of slavery, of racial apartheid had won the day in the state despite places in the region that had sprouted fierce assertions of civil rights for all. Certainly, reading the biographical and autobiographical memoirs of black Kentuckians one learns of a world shaped by feudal forces of imperialist white supremacist capitalism but one also learns of all the inventive ways black folks deployed to survive and thrive in the midst of exploitation and oppression.
    During the more than thirty years that I did not make my home in Kentucky, much that I did not like about life in my home state (the cruel racist exploitation and oppression that continued from slavery into the present day, the disenfranchisement of poor and/or hillbilly people, the relentless assault on nature) was swiftly becoming the norm everywhere. Throughout our nation the dehumanization of poor people, the destruction of nature for capitalist development, the disenfranchisement of people of color, especially, African-Americans, the resurgence of white supremacy and with plantation culture has become an accepted way of life. Yet returning to my home state all the years that I was living away, I found there essential remnants of a culture of belonging, a sense of the meaning and vitality of geographical place.
    All the positive aspects of a culture of belonging that Kentucky offered me were not present in other places. And maybe it would have been harder for me to return to my native place if I had not consistently sustained and nurtured bonds of kin and family despite living away. My last lengthy place of residence prior to becoming a resident of Kentucky was New York City. Had anyone ever predicted when I was younger that I would one day live in Manhattan I would have responded: “that is never gonna’ happen — cause I am a country girl through and through.” Concurrently, had I been told that I would return in mid-life to live in Kentucky, I would have responded: “when they send my ashes home.” New York City was one of the few places in the world where I experienced loneliness for the first time. I attributed this to the fact that there one lives in close proximity to so many people engaging in a kind of pseudo intimacy but rarely genuine