Holy Land: Part I

RESPONDING TO D.J. WALDIE: HOLY LAND (PP. 1-95)

In the introduction to the Rhizomatic West, Neil Campbell’s central focus is opening and exposing ideas of the West to interests and voices that better fit the transnational, global age we now occupy. Central to this project is both an acknowledgment of the pervasive grid that has traditionally bounded and influenced Western life and thinking. This post-West space is not defined by traditionally held values of rooted-ness in place, but rather in the routes and multiple human interactions that have shaped the Western region. Many of these ideas of both being rooted and third space (lines of flight that permeate the grid) are drawn out and explored in D.J. Waldie’s memoir of his suburban life growing up in Los Angles, Holy Land.

The story of life in the Lakewood suburb described by Waldie is like a distillation of the grid space that Campbell focuses in on as a defining feature of how the West is conceptualized. The massive suburban developments grid space and creates routines and habits for its inhabitants on both the macro and microcosmic scale. Waldie discusses how he has lived in the same suburban home his parents purchased, and of his routine in walking to work past homes with the same designs, differentiated purely by their unique ornamentation and/or the different types of trees planted in front by the city government.

And yet, even the ordered space of the grid has lines of flight out that resonate with Campbell’s larger thesis. At one point Waldie discusses the feelings of unease and disorder that arise in the community when a home is put up for sale and sits empty. It is a feeling of disquiet that acts as a line of flight out of the traditionally bounded ways of life in the suburb. Similarly the individual actions of people in the suburb often act to provide moments of disconnect that create a third space in Lakewood. Specifically, Waldie writes of a man who accumulates junk and stores it in his yard. It is a practice that eventually leads to the city stepping in and evicting the man from his home. Another moment comes when a woman in the suburb unexpectedly burns her house down. These moments are reactions to the space created by the suburb, and in their ways they temporarily reorder space and demonstrate the flexibility and potential for change within a space that is often cast as rigid and inflexible.

Another point Waldie illuminates that speaks to the Campbell thesis comes in the form of the individuals who tended to occupy the first suburbs. While restrictive zoning covenants often acted to prevent minorities from entering into (and impacting) the community, for many who came to the suburb it was seen as an important socioeconomic step up. These socioeconomic routes converging in the space of the suburb is an idea that converges with Campbell’s thinking on the importance of better understanding the transference and carving out of third space that occurs when human routes intersect. In fact, it is the flow of capital in and out of place (that fundamentally acts to reshape it) that seems of central interest and importance to a re-imagined West (situated within a transnational, globalized context).