What a Tent is For

Sienna Craig

The room, with its polished granite slabs and crown molding, suggests a gilding — that shimmered varnishing of truth. We speak of escalation, and what de-escalation might mean.

I didn’t want this to happen.

And yet it did.

We can agree to disagree.

Maybe. But how might we hold the difference between that deep knotting in a chest – what each of us can and cannot hold – and something intelligible as threat?

Late afternoon light glints off sleek armored vehicles. Unmarked, they lurk on the edge of our shared space. In the background: students singing.

A man calls our Green a park, snuffs out a cigarette with steel toed boots. Clouds knot and release in the shape of question marks, the gloaming alive with crows.

Within hours, floodlights, bullet-proof vests, face shields, batons — each object a form  of encroachment, an unspooling of violent probabilities. The real trespass.

A tent can be many things.

Coarse fibers the color of coal, woven to create the inky illusion of stars when mountain sun shines through; and by night, firmament and a glass bright moon, as yak muzzle grassland in the dark

Brittle blue tarpaulin, crinkled into submission through days of folding and unfolding, making and shifting and remaking the ground, after Earth shook. So imperfect, this dwelling, muddied at the edges, strung together with nylon and grief

Sun-bleached canvas, white hot in its capacity to hold, if not to absorb, irremediable loss and the possibility, still, of new architectures — toward a desert form of being, and of being home

Nylon and aluminum rainbowed together in a canopy of arboreal suggestion, this gathering of multiple species — root and branch, fungus and rhizome, breath and photosynthesis — each with our capacities for exhale, here in the North Country

A tent is a bridge

between exposure and care

or maybe even

between danger and discomfort

Now, we are cloaked in some other material

It neither resists the deluge

nor protects us from ourselves

This is the opposite of shelter

And yet and yet and yet

Open the flap and there it is:

more than a crack; light floods in.

Sienna Craig is the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire (USA). Raised in Santa Barbara, California, she received her BA in Religious Studies from Brown University (1995) and her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Cornell University (2006). Craig enjoys writing across genres and has published poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and children’s literature in addition to scholarly works in medical and cultural anthropology. Her most recent book, which combines literary ethnography with short fiction, is The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York (University of Washington Press, 2020). She is also the author of Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (University of California Press, 2012), and Horses Like Lightning: A Story of Passage through the Himalaya (Wisdom Publications, 2008), among other works.