After four months in Detroit, poet Casey Rocheteau is making an impact, making new friends and making mental adjustments about what's safe.
"The reminders of fear are constant," the 29-year-old Brooklyn transplant posts at her blog, referring to "conversations that remind me of the fearful Detroit."
Everyone is telling the truth, but it’s not nearly as bad as some people would have you believe. I’ve had my house broken into on the swanky East Side of Providence, RI. I have never been mugged anywhere, but the closest I came was a mile away from where my biological father grew up. I can’t count the number of times I was certain I was about to be kidnapped while living in Brooklyn, walking alone at any hour of the day as a car slowed down beside me.
Casey Rocheteau: "For the most part, I’ve been able to keep fear at bay. It’s not easy in Detroit, honestly."
As the first winner of a "Write a House" literary residence nonprofit innovation, Rocheteau lives in a newly renovated home just north of Hamtramck.
Her role includes coaching young writers in the InsideOut Literary Arts project, which visits Detroit schools. Some student work reinforces what the published poet calls "a kind of trauma of place."
The young people that I work with . . .write about not going outside in their neighborhoods. . . .
Fear is real, it is a powerful and potent drug, and it shouldn’t define a place or its inhabitants. Detroit is a wild and beautiful city filled with exceptional people that cannot be described by statistics or the actions of the violent and unstable. I’ve lived in cities that are consistently described as prestigious landmarks and felt far more threatened in my daily life than I have here. . . .
For the most part, I’ve been able to keep fear at bay. It’s not easy in Detroit, honestly. I’m not saying this because I am easily spooked by statistics about crime or fires or anything of that sort, but because the reminders of fear are constant.
It happens when I exit a car and run into a store quickly. Invariably, the car doors are locked when I return. It happens when I’m having a casual conversation with a funny Uber driver who . . . makes a joke about how I should have told him we were going to the east side, because he would have come strapped. It happens every time my phone buzzes, signaling a flare-up on the neighborhood text chain. It happens when a reporter is interviewing me, but explains she’s a bit out of sorts because a close friend of hers was recently shot one minute after she left his home.
Rocheteau acknowledges that these anecdotes aren't "specific to Detroit, but . . . are tied up in poverty and underground economies that exist everywhere."
In her online essay, titled "Thaw," the ex-New Yorker describes herself as "able to loosen the restraints that fear tries to place on me."
So far no anvils have fallen from the sky. It hasn’t been easy all the time, but I frequently find myself in the company of likeable, kind and warm strangers.
At this stage in my journey here in Detroit, I’ve started to feel a bit like a crocus poking its first tendril finger above soil. I’ve made new friends, and I feel like I’m thawing, getting acclimated, ready to see how many guests I can fit around my new table
Earlier coverage at Deadline:
