A recent viral video of a homeless
opera singer in Los Angeles led to a happy ending. But it’s a
reminder that capitalism prevents millions of our greatest talents
(and everyone else too) from reaching their immense creative
potential.
Los Angeles’s metro system is
better than this famously car-reliant city would have you believe.
It’s rarely crowded, and though its reach is limited, it is
relatively fast and well-maintained.
Still, the operative word is
“relative.” As with most public
transit in late-late-capitalist America, riding on it is a
soul-suck; your free will stripped away the minute you descend down
into it so that you can be shuttled and herded about underneath an
indifferent metropolis.
Beauty is the last thing you expect
to find down here. When you do, it forces you to stop take note. A
police officer’s phone
video of Emily Zamourka singing opera on the platform, the
transcendent notes of Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” echoing up
and down the tunnel, gave us a peek at how it might feel for this
buried urban space to feel more human.
Zamourka was dubbed the “subway
soprano.” Now her story is being shared as the latest viral
American Alger-ism. Zamourka, you see, is homeless. Or at least
she was.
Within a week of the video being tweeted out by the LAPD, a GoFundMe
was set up for her that raked in over thirty thousand dollars. LA
City Council member Joe Buscaino’s office stepped in to find her
housing. An Italian-American festival hired her to perform for seven
hundred dollars. It would appear that Zamourka has a bright future in
the arts in front of her.
As with all mainstream news stories
though, there is more in what isn’t said than what is. The bulk of
the coverage suggests that Zamourka, a woman of undeniable talent,
never deserved to be counted among the ranks of LA’s homeless in
the first place. Which raises an unsettling underlying question:
who does deserve
to be homeless?
Here is Zamourka’s story: twenty
years ago, she immigrated from Russia. She is a classically trained
violinist and pianist. Three years ago, she suffered a wrist injury
that left her unable to work. Then her violin was stolen. She was
unable to pay her bills or rent, and soon found herself without
shelter. Tragic for sure. It is also utterly
unexceptional.
The severity of LA’s housing
crisis is well-known. Every night around 60,000 sleep rough.
Encampments and tent cities of various size are around virtually any
corner. Skid Row, with over 5,000 living in tents on sidewalks, gives
you a vivid sense of how desperate it can be.
Here, the city has refused to
provide adequate public toilets, water fountains, or trash cans.
Residents have been subject to sanitation sweeps in which sleeping
bags, medication, and identification are confiscated by police. A
great many residents are in dire need of addiction treatment or
mental health services. But past the stigmatizing, there are also
artists, teachers, human beings living here. Indeed, it was Skid Row
residents who painted the neighborhood’s acerbic “city limits”
mural: “Skid Row City Limit, Population: Too Many.”
In a 2018 interview with Al
Jazeera, Skid Row resident Suzette Shaw said that the city’s
instinct is to “pathologize poor people. We see them as lazy, we
see them as not really trying … Yet we don’t see the resolve that
it actually take to sustain out here, and to have hope when there is
no hope. I’ve met women [on Skid Row] who are nurses, Stanford
graduates … I’ve met people who are connected to celebrities
living out here.”
This past spring saw a lawsuit
brought by Skid Row residents settled by LA city courts that place
legal limits on confiscations during sweeps, a small but significant
win for the unhoused. But with that has been the rise of a grisly
vigilantism. August and September saw a small rash of fires
deliberately set to encampments in the LA area. At least two men,
including a beloved Skid Row street musician named Darrell Fields,
have died.
Though the city passed a resolution
in 2016 mandating a certain number of affordable housing units in
each newly constructed residential building, not much has come of it.
Developers, backed up by a vindictive NIMBY-ism, have kicked the can
down the road and promised to build twice as many units in their next
project. It’s a promise they have no evident intention of
fulfilling.
Which in practice only leaves the
jails, the cops, and the vigilantes as a way to “deal with the
homeless problem.” A few weeks before Emily Zamourka’s
“discovery,” Donald Trump visited Los Angeles, taking the
opportunity to fulminate over the housing crisis, suggesting that
police and local businesses should simply raze the encampments, and
that the unhoused should be shoved into detention centers.
It’s a chilling prospect,
particularly with atrocities in the US’ current concentration camps
so well-known. But it’s not substantively different from the
punitive way of dealing with the unhoused already employed by the
city. The sanctimony of the LAPD’s tweet lauding Zamourka — “4
million people call LA home. 4 million stories. 4 million voices …
sometimes you just have to stop and listen to one, to hear something
beautiful” — belies that the LAPD rarely treat the homeless as
people to begin with.
In her own interview on CNN,
Zamourka alluded to this. “I see this police officer walking
towards me from a distance and I kind of hesitated because you know
how they are … they don’t really want you to make any noises
anywhere. And opera is loud.” Busking is legal but highly
restricted on the Metro. There are plenty of LA cops who might have
heard Zamourka’s song and decided to make an example of her. It’s
a common sight on any commute.
Ponder how
many other unhoused and poor don’t find
their talents put on display for the world to see. How many are
simply hassled along
from encampment to jail and back again. How many of their songs have
gone unwritten? Masterpieces unpainted? Equations unsolved? Diseases
uncured?
Now consider how many might exist
if our cities, our lives, revolved around radical accessibility and
democracy: if housing and health
care were treated as rights rather than commodities, if
education and the arts were opened to all rather than hoarded and
distributed by and for the wealthy, and if the reproduction of public
space required participation rather than policing.
It is no exaggeration to say that
Zamourka’s story holds both visions, both reality and possibility,
within it. She has described the support she has gotten, the fact
that she now has a home and a platform, as “a miracle.” True
enough. The point, however, is that it shouldn’t be. It should come
standard in any sane society.
>> The article above was written by Alexander Billet, and is reprinted from Jacobin.
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