Ashes float from the sky and cover my car, the streets and everything around me. Five fires have been burning parts of Los Angeles for 10 days. On the afternoon of January 7, I notice fewer cars on the streets. The sky is grey, covering southern California’s golden sunset light, my favorite time to hike on trails I have grown to love, but I stay indoors. Meteorologists have issued warnings about high Santa Ana winds that are already causing havoc in the Palisades, 20 miles from me.
By 7 pm, I start receiving alerts on my phone. A new fire has broken out in Altadena, a neighborhood five miles away. I’m co-Poet Laureate of Altadena, along with Lester Graves Lennon, who has lived there for 20 years.
Altadena, at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, has been a rare refuge for Black families since the 1960s, allowing them to purchase land, build homes and create generational wealth against systemic oppression. Though the area has gentrified considerably, the small town continues to serve as home for the highest percentage of Black residents in San Gabriel Valley.
That night, smoke enters my house and I spend the evening on my phone, monitoring the fires and responding to messages. I check on friends in different parts of Altadena, Pasadena and the Sylmar valley, many of whom receive evacuation notices. Through the course of the first night, the Eaton fire builds as the wind gusts at more than 90 miles per hour.
A large number of Altadena residents are barely able to drive away with the clothes on their backs, their houses burning behind them. On other Altadena streets, in the absence of firefighters and no water pressure, neighbours shovel dirt on flames to try and extinguish the fire.
I receive messages from friends and family around the world asking if I’m okay. People are reaching out because social and mainstream media are reporting the Los Angeles fires worldwide, blow by blow. The media coverage of the wealthy Palisades is mainly making the news, compared to the Eaton fire in Altadena, Pasadena and neighbouring cities.
The next day, Pasadena has an apocalyptic aura. No one is on the streets. No airplanes, local trains, or traffic. I feel as if I’m in a disaster movie set except that the sky is smoke-filled; the air quality index exceeds 400 – worse than Delhi or Lahore in the winter – and my eyes water.
Over the course of two weeks, the fires spread over 40,000 acres, and more than 14,000 structures are destroyed and at least 24 people are missing or have died.
A day or two after the fires erupt, life in most of Los Angeles resumes to normal, but schools and offices remain closed in Pasadena, while the National Guard restricts entrances to Altadena and in the Palisades. Life is not normal. As recovery slowly begins, residents report being approached by buyers and there are fears of gentrification and of Altadena’s demography changing.
Altadena cemetery, where the prescient Black writer Octavia Butler is buried, suffered minimal damage. In her bestselling novel, Parable of the Sower (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993), she predicts that 2024 would be the year when the world as we know it will collapse, that wildfires will scorch Southern California and climate change will make many parts of the United States uninhabitable.
Fires everywhere
On January 7, the first night, amidst warnings that winds are gusting at more than 90 mph, I turn to another urgent matter and join a Zoom call. It’s organised by a non-profit for women artists, to discuss participating in a boycott movement against Israel.
I sign on as the presenters stress the effectiveness of boycott movements. When it’s time for participants to offer input, many oppose taking an organisational stand against Israel. My daughter and I listen as winds shake the house.
When it’s my turn, I talk about the arts nonprofit that I founded and ran in Houston for 18 years. We spoke out on urgent issues, including Palestine, reproductive rights, racism, gun control, immigration and more.
I tell them about my first home, Pakistan, where poets have been jailed for speaking out. I talk about attending college in Massachusetts in the mid-1980s when we protested for divestment against South Africa.
“Our demands were met,” I say. “Boycott works. We’ve seen it.”
After the call, my daughter, a college sophomore, says how difficult it was for her to hear women speak in defense of an army’s actions against civilians.
At that moment homes are burning just five miles north of us. We also know that 7,500 miles on the other side of the world, homes, tents, hospitals have been flattened by bombs while the death count grows and that it is undercounted by 41%, according to the medical journal Lancet.
Neither community knows what the future holds for them. I grieve for both.
Everything is connected
“The fires consuming California are the result of decades of deliberate choices made by corporations and politicians who value profit over people, fossil fuels over sustainability, and exploitation over equity,” as Pakistani-origin human rights lawyer and political activist Qasim Rashid said. “These wildfires were predicted –and avoidable.”
Indigenous communities have called for using their methods to manage the ecosystem instead of increasing danger by relying on fossil fuel and cutting firefighting budgets as the Los Angeles mayor did last year. Simultaneously, Los Angeles increased the budget for the city’s police department that has a relationship with its Israeli counterparts.
Even as state and local funds are being cut, over the past 15 months, the Biden administration has sent over $17 billion to fund the Israeli army, as writer Olga Garcia Echeverria reminds us. Meanwhile “the government fails us again and again by centering profits over people and investing in militarisation, policing, destruction, and climate change denial”, she comments on Instagram.
And two weeks ago as Southern California burned, Congress passed legislation to sanction the International Court of Law that has issued warrants of arrest for Netanyahu and his cohorts.
Now that a new temporary ceasefire has finally been agreed upon and hostages from both sides are being released, it’s even more urgent to push for the end of apartheid and dignity and self-determination for the Palestinian people. Six weeks will not bring back the 64,000 plus people killed by US-made Israeli bombs, 51% of whom were women and children.
Five days after the fires break out, my daughter and I volunteer in the Santa Anita Park parking lot. Along with a row of people, young and old, we direct a steady stream of cars, SUVs, and trucks that roll up to donate bottled water, hot food, masks, and other necessities. Behind us, we see the San Gabriel Mountains and smoke spiraling.
Others park their cars, so they can collect what they need. No one asks people to show addresses to prove their loss. Those who show up expressing a need, return to their car with baskets of clothing, food and more.
In Pasadena, where water has been declared unsafe, the city’s municipal team sets up a water distribution line, but water donation centres popup at street corners. Many donation centres are turning volunteers away.
Educators and students, as well as Altadena and Pasadena businesses and religious institutions, have set up GoFundMe campaigns. Financial support is pouring in. People want to help.
This kind of grassroots mutual aid is powerful, but many are asking if insurance will compensate adequately. And will the federal, state, and local government cover the gap – especially now that a new president has been inaugurated, one who has threatened to eliminate public health and social security.
“The things we are forced to manage through GoFundme as a human race are absurd – feeding people through a genocide as our taxes go to kill them, housing people through a fire as not enough of our taxes go to save them,” says sociologist Heba Gowayed, cited by poet and activist Saul Williams on Instagram. “All in the world’s richest country.”
In Southern California, Palestine, Sudan, Afghanistan, Kashmir and across the world in regions and countries, too many to name, humans have caused mass suffering through policy decisions, state-funded violence, and human (in)action – not natural disasters. This week’s fire devastation in Southern California is part of a larger pattern that will continue unless communities work across borders to find pathways to turn the tide.
Uncomfortable as it is to bring up these issues and raise questions while people suffer, we must challenge the systems that create “disasters”. I write this essay even as losses are assessed and wind alerts issued. By no means can I cover the complexity of issues that Altadena and Los Angeles faces.
As a transnational citizen I have experienced floods, hurricanes, and now destructive fires, in the cities I call home – Karachi, Houston, and Los Angeles. All these “natural disasters” are connected to deforestation, water control and climate change.
As we gather to deliver mutual aid – after witnessing the grief of those in Altadena and Los Angeles – we must also demand government structures invest in life-affirming infrastructure in our communities instead of funding violence and furthering climate change.
Sehba Sarwar is a novelist (Black Wings, second edition, Veliz Books, 2019) poet, and essayist. While based in Houston, she founded and directed a social justice arts organization, Voices Breaking Boundaries, that tackled urgent issues through art. She is a recipient of multiple artist awards, her papers are archived at the University of Houston, and she serves as Altadena co-Poet Laureate.
This is a Sapan News syndicated feature.
