Well, I am still learning this Google blog, but I will not waste time apologizing. I get to the chase and write my first response to the Wagamese interview, which was an excellent supplement to our reading Ragged Company. Homelessness is a topic that has been written and talked about a lot, but it just keeps staying with us as a "social problem." It takes an artist like Wagamese to open our eyes and see homelessness "as broad as the human story." This interview makes us realize that we tend to see homelessness as a "problem" and try to approach it as if it had a solution, but it is a lot more than that. It is the human story, or rather, an endless glob of stories that we just cannot seem to be able to untangle with all the "filaments," as Wagamese says, attached to it. People do not choose to be and do not end up being homeless. It is a long process, and, as we learn from his account, some return to homelessness and struggle all their life. It is like once a homeless, you are always homeless, one way or other.
Once a student, one of the many who chose to write one of those "college essays" about homelessness wrote, "Sometimes I feel that there is only a flimsy paycheck that separates me from a homeless person." I may not quote accurately his words, but there is a reason why this sentence stuck in my mind after all those years and all those essays I read. It was one honest statement about all our fears, discomfort and anxiety that homelessness creates in us. We would like to see ourselves on the other side and homelessness as something that should never happen to us, but we should know better. It could be just one missed paycheck perhaps, but then it could also be a lot more. It could be hidden traumas; it could be addiction; it could be larger socio-economic or political forces that are beyond our control. There are millions of people in the world who move to other countries, hoping to find a place to be--and become homeless. As it is suggested in Ragged Company, you can be homeless even when you have a home. One for the Dead suddenly realizes that Granite, who has a home, is homeless in some sense, and she comes to this conclusion after she notices no photographs in Granite's home. So, it is good to stop and think for a while perhaps and listen to the stories to understand what it takes to be the opposite of homeless and be someone who has a home in this world. It is not just the paycheck or a winning lottery ticket. To be not homeless, you have to fight the "belly bombs" and go through the whole painful process until you come out, in Wagamese's words, a "different breed of cat."
Books like Ragged Company help us understand this process in all its depth and frustrating details more than anything else. Wagamese rejects what he calls an "aboriginal industry" of sociological "research" built around homelessness as a social problem, targeting, in particular, the Native population. I can see his bitterness, yet I would like to defend research, quoting the lines from Smoke Signals about the need for listening to both the truth and the lies. I hope that at least some of the studies, the statistics and the causal analysis is not completely useless since some of those studies often lead to social programs that, as imperfect as they may be, are created to alleviate homelessness. But I think Wagamese has seen a lot more useless and misguided research than I have, which explains his indignation. Yet, I would say, we need both the research and the stories, and we need to accept that there is good and bad research, and there are good and bad stories.
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