It was early 2012 when I first encountered Tent City. Sherry Rubel, a photographer who had done work for my Patch sites, had posted a press release to South Brunswick Patch explaining a Kickstarter campaign she had launched focusing on what was supposed to be a photo-music collaboration focusing on the tent encampment. I found it intriguing and, having recently read C.D. Wright’s remarkable One Big Self — a book that started with a photographer inviting the poet to write about the prisoners she was photographing — for my master’s thesis, it was clear to me that I had to get involved.
I reached out to Sherry and, eventually, brought in documentary filmmaker Jack Ballo and The Tent City Project was born. The idea was for each of us to spend time in the tent encampment, but to follow our own creative paths. Jack’s film, Destiny’s Bridge, opened in August with a small photo exhibit by Sherry and, while the bulk of the work was finished on my manuscript, I was not getting any bites from publishers.
That changed last night when the prestigious Serving House Journal posted issue no. 8 last night. The issue features three selections from As an Alien in a Land of Promise, my poem, and six photos from Sherry, along with an author’s statement. It is an exciting moment, not only because my work is getting published alongside nationally renowned writers like Billy Collins and and my friends Tom Kennedy and Walter Cummins, and not only because Sherry’s wonderful photos are getting the national play they deserve, but because the plight of the people in the camp — and the larger group of people they represent — is continuing to get exposure.
Make no mistake, the individual stories are important and Tent City residents are now facing a difficult winter. Despite a consent order agreed to earlier this year that was supposed to result in housing for camp residents and the closure of the camp, the homeless and their de facto leader Steve Brigham are still battling with authorities in Lakewood whose primary goal remains erasing Tent City from existence.
Both sides carry some blame here — the encampment, because of the larger failure of American society to deal with what the reality of homelessness says about our economy, has continued to grow, in contravention of the agreement, and the township of Lakewood, because of its continued antipathy to the people in the camp. And both are also right in their claims — if not in the woods, then where, the homeless say, while the immediate neighbors of the camp complain about its very real impacts (smoke, noise, etc.).
The project for me was about both these individual and about what Tent City — and the hundreds like it around the country — means metaphorically. If we can continue to treat men and women as disposable, if we can view them as refuse because they may not have something to offer a capitalist system that judges worth purely on its impact on the corporate bottom line, then we will never be able to rid ourselves of tent encampments no matter how many affordable houses we create and no matter how high we raise the minimum wage (both of which I support).
The homeless, in the American capitalist system, are refuse. And they are weeds — invaders in the garden of consumerism, finding dead areas in which to live, to survive, parasites to some but clarions to those of us who view the system itself as choking on its own brutal illogic.
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Hank Kalet 