Chaney Hill is a second year PhD student in the English Department at Rice University. Her research interests include feminist theory, twentieth and twenty-first century American literature, posthumanism, ecological thought, animal studies, and critical regionalism.

Brief Summary: Our notions of place and space are fundamentally connected to capitalist hierarchies of power; this paper uses ideas of “semantic poverty/richness” to understand how we come to view certain places as meaningful and others as empty spaces. In the context of Bryan Washington’s Lot, Hill explores the ways in which marginalized communities challenge hegemonic understandings of space, as they embrace communal activity to generate meaning, placedness, and semantic richness.

---

In Literary Houston, Phillip Lopate describes Houston as an “alternation of being and nothingness… [a] rhythm of negative and positive space, the lacunae, the gaps between teeth, the no-man’s land of vacant lots” (226-7). The placelessness of Houston has often been remarked upon by outsiders, with Lopate, a transplanted New Yorker, being just one of them.¹ In the introduction to Literary Houston, the authors reflect: “[w]here is the great Houston novel, the one that explains the city” (xiii). They rail against the sentiment that Houston is seen not as a “real city,” but instead as no more than “an economic zone where you go to make your first million before moving on to less humid and topographically deprived pastures” (xiii). Houston is, in their words, “an amnesiac city” (xiv). It is a city that is easily forgotten, and when it is remembered, it is done so through a narrow lens of understanding: “the murder capital of the country,” the Bushes, oil and gas production, or the place where you earn your rewards, not enjoy them (xv-xvi). Houston is often rendered as an empty, negative space and not as a positive place.² On the topic of place and space, Tim Cresswell, in Place: A Short Introduction, posits that places are spaces that have been made relationally meaningful.³ The meanings that places take on are often deeply invested in power systems such that place “is space invested with meaning in the context of power” (12). Place is, in other words, enmeshed in webs of power, with some places being literally and semantically richer than others. Semantic richness and its opposite, semantic poverty, are terms I am employing and coining in this paper to engage in conversations about privileged literary infrastructures that make spaces into places through text and language. Semantic richness and poverty refer both to the complexity and quantity of literature that takes place in a specific location and allows for a complex understanding of that place and to the texture and fullness of language used by and through a given text that, through its excess of language, creates a surplus of meaning and placedness.⁴hereas the politico-logical notion of democracy carries a deficit of depth and substance, community carries, quite differently, a semantic richness” (Esposito 37). It is also taken in part through Niklas Luhmann’s conceptualization of semantic overburdening in Social Systems wherein an object is made to “appear more complex than it is for itself” through scientific observation and analysis (57). Luhmann argues that an object that is made more complex than it sees itself is overburdened and “irritates, unsettles, disturbs, and possibly destroys” the object’s “self-referential order” (57). Both of these scholars contributed to my thinking about semantic richness and poverty although they did not singly define the terms for me. Rather, I build off of and modify their definitions to work towards a definition of semantic richness and poverty that takes into account power structures and literary infrastructures.] Consider, for instance, the semantic wealth of a city like New York and the plurality of different conceptions of placedness it has in comparison to the semantically poor Houston with its mostly singular identity as an oil-collecting, Bush loving, pickup truck-filled, swamp city. These differing conceptions of place through semantic richness and poverty are, in large part, conceived through different axes of power.

The semantic poverty of Houston often takes shape in the singular view of the city as associated with business and commerce, which is occasionally interrupted by “niche” spaces where commercial activities are absent. In “Taking Place: Rebar’s Absurd Tactics in Generous Urbanism,” Blain Merker posits that niche spaces are places that are “undervalued, or valued inappropriately for the range of potential activities within them” (49). The niche spaces that Merker cites in their article are paid parking spots which have been retaken through the “Park(ing)” movement where people pay for a parking spot in a commercial area but use that metered spot for non-commercial park activities (sometimes by bringing in turf, plants, benches, or even lemonade stands) (49). For Merker, niche spaces can be “opened up to revaluation through creative acts” (49). Niches are analogous to but transcendent of the “rhythm of negative and positive space” that Lopate sees in Houston (Lopate 226). Niches are not a “no-man’s land of vacant lots,” but a “zone of potential” and a “surface onto which the intentions of any number of political, social or cultural agendas could be projected” (Lopate 226-7, Merker 49). Niches are, among other things, empty spaces that have the subversive potential to become semantically rich places through creative acts. In this paper, I look to creative acts such as story-telling and how these acts, especially when they are communal, can impart semantic richness to places, both real and imagined. I use Houston as a backdrop because of its semantic poverty and I look to Bryan Washington’s novel Lot because of its focus on undervalued niche places in Houston.

While Houston has been conceptualized as a city of “vacant lots,” Bryan Washington’s novel, Lot,  pushes back against the placelessness of Houston (Lopate 226-7; italics mine). Although there are moments in Lot that reinforce placelessness in Houston, the novel also refutes the claim that Houston is placeless. Lot follows various characters in a series of chapters that are all named (with the exclusion of its title chapter, “Lot”) after Houston streets, neighborhoods, or landmarks. The naming of each chapter after a specific place creates a map of Houston that rejects hegemonic mapping practices that focalize prominent and wealthy areas. Minute Maid and NASA are not featured as chapters; instead, areas such as Alief, the Bayou, or Peggy Park, located in the historically black Third Ward, are. By ignoring well-known and privileged places of Houston, Washington reorients readers to niche spaces that only appear empty. The narrative through line of Lot follows the story of a multiethnic family and is narrated by a teenage boy within that family, while other stories percolate around the edges. Readers learn about the consequences a woman’s affair has for her apartment complex; they are introduced to a community of young men who have sex for money and their concerns with AIDS; they encounter a Chupacabra and its brethren that live along the Bayou and are shown what Dwight Garner of The New York Times calls a “vibrant, polyglot side of Houston about which few outsiders are aware.”

Washington’s Houston fills the negative spaces that Lopate and others draw attention to with vibrant narratives about the lives of those that are typically rendered invisible: the impoverished, black and brown families, and the queer life. Washington’s narrative not only represents the entirety of Houston differently than the hegemonic and semantically poor vision of Houston does, but it also pays attention to the hidden and niche spaces in the city and the political web of powers that exist in place-making activities. Washington’s depiction of underprivileged peoples, communities, and neighborhoods as a “rich and complicated interplay of people and environments” speaks to Cresswell’s theorization that when one thinks “of an area of the world” as a complex environment, it “free[s] us from thinking of it as facts and figures” (11). Lot does not discuss oil, the “Bush Family …[or the] space industry” that non-Houstonians associate with the city (Garner). Instead, the novel looks to places defined by street names and intersections (“Lockwood,” “610 North, 610 West,” “Shepard,” “South Congress,” “Navigation,” “Fannin,” “Waugh,” “Elgin”), neighborhoods (“Alief,” “Wayside”), or specific landmarks (“Bayou,” “Peggy Park”).⁵ This is not to say that the simple act of entitling chapters after places garners them place-hood, but rather that, in the context of Lot, historically impoverished places in Houston that would otherwise have been overlooked are given a sense of place in Washington’s narrative through the semantic richness of the stories. The “facts and figures” of these underprivileged areas are transcended when Washington writes them as complex environments.

Lot announces itself, knows itself, and geographically orients itself through places that Lopate might call negative spaces (meaning empty) and that Merker would call niche spaces (having discursive, dynamic potential). After articulating his experience of placelessness in Houston as a transplanted New Yorker, Lopate states:

I can’t help noticing the oddity of two major thoroughfares crossing each other without anything more dramatic than a 7-Eleven convenience store and gas station to mark the juncture. It seems to me that major intersections should be commemorated by an intensification of city life — a department store, a big movie theater, a dance hall, a public square or park, something­­. (240)

For Lopate, a local 7-Eleven convenience store and gas station is not something; it is a negative space that is not made into a place. The 7-Eleven is in juxtaposition to a department store, movie theatre, public park, or dance hall, indicating that what makes these other spaces count as something is the ability to gather and participate in a communal activity, usually through the auspices of commerce. One may shop with friends at a department store, watch a movie in a room full of friends and strangers, enjoy a day at the park with family and perhaps a beloved pet, or go dancing with one’s partner after a long workweek. Comparatively, the gas station is a transitory space where people enter and exit quickly. It is assumed one doesn’t linger at a gas station or make a gas station meaningful in the same way as the theater, dance hall, or park. The gas station may be a place where one can buy snacks and gas, but it is not a place where one participates in commercial leisure. Communal-commercial leisure seems to be what makes a space a place. The hierarchization of spaces being positive or negative, as being full or empty, or as being semantically rich or poor, renders many places in Houston as negative, empty spaces. In turn, this renders the lives of those who inhabit the ‘empty’ places as invisible. They live in a no-where and no-thing place. This is an inherently privileged view of what places count, which seems to suggest that many places in Houston do not.

This is the work that Washington’s novel attempts to undo. The plurality of looping stories in Washington’s tales gives placedness without demanding a singular identity for those places, which in turn lends Houston a semantic richness and depth through the plurality of identities it allows. Semantic richness relies on a plurality of meanings lest it fall into poverty. If a text, place, or thing does not have a plurality of meanings it is semantically impoverished. Because Lot houses a plurality of narratives that are outside of the hegemonic view of Houston, it gives Houston further semantic depth and richness. One such chapter, “Alief,” focuses on the impoverished and high-crime neighborhood of Alief located in southwest Houston. According to the Texas Observer, Alief “has one of the highest crime rates in Houston. It also has one of the highest populations of former prisoners in the state. About 500 former inmates a year… move to Alief, according to a study by the National Urban Institute” (Elbein). In the 80s, around the time Lopate wrote his rumination on Houston, Alief was “touted as a bedroom community for the upper middle class” and was believed to be the next Katy or the Woodlands (Elbein). However, this plan did not work out in the coming years, and soon the Alief apartments built for middle class workers were dropping their prices as “poor people from the city and working-class immigrants from a hundred different countries” moved in, making Alief one of the most diverse, impoverished, and high-crime neighborhoods in Houston (Elbein). While Washington’s “Alief” has seen state, personal, gang, and drug violence, much like the real Alief, Washington’s re-rendering of an apartment community in Alief that recounts a tale of violence rewrites that violent act with a semantic richness that creates a textured, in-depth view of Alief. Washington’s creative act works within the niche space of Alief, lending it placedness through the semantic richness of the narrative.

“Alief,” written in first person plural, peers into the lives of an apartment community as they rehash and try to make sense of the events leading up to the murder of one of their own when their neighbor, Aja, has an affair with a “white boy” named James, and Paul, Aja’s husband, murders James (Washington 10). The chapter begins:

Just before they slept together for the final time and before Aja’s lover was tossed by her husband, our neighborhood diplomat, onto the concrete curb outside their apartment complex, and then choked, by that same man, with his bare hands, in front of an audience of streetlights, the corner store, Joaquin, LaNeesh, Isabella, Big A, and the Haitian neighbors, James asked Aja to tell him a story. (Washington 7)

The witnesses to this murder include not only people from their neighborhood but also the streetlights and the corner store, which very well could be a 7-Eleven. This event happens not just in an empty space, but takes place on the street, under street lights, and in front of the corner store. It is made meaningful both to the reader and to the characters within the narrative. While streets may usually only be perceived as a space for vehicles, in “Alief” the street is a niche territory that becomes inscribed with greater meaning,accommodating activities beyond travel and commerce. This is the place where James is choked to death.

In Washington’s “Alief,” a neighborhood that has seen “coke wars, turf realignments, the usual school zoning violence, and shootouts,” niche spaces that in Lopate’s world are no more than  spaces where one can refuel their vehicle or drive past while on an interstate highway hold meaning for those who live there (Washington 13). This is not to say that Lopate is willfully overlooking Alief and places like it when he describes Houston as a “rhythm of negative and positive space,” but rather that when a place is semantically poor because so little place-making is made available for an outsider to make-place-with, it is viewed as a blank, as negative space, or as a gap in the teeth (Lopate 226). Because there is not a proliferation of tales emerging from places like Alief that give it semantic richness or environmental complexity, outside communities are unable to conceptualize the placedness of Alief. This does not mean, however, that Alief is empty; rather, it is a niche space wherein creative acts can make visible different systems of valuation.

Alief, the corner store, and the streets are given further semantic richness and valuation when the narrators reflect on the places where Aja and James ran into each other before his murder. The narrators state, “[b]efore all that, we watched them meet in the market…the laundromat… the corner store…the sidewalk… the Dollar Tree…[and] MLK Boulevard” (Washington 9). These spaces are made places in part because they mean something for their community. These places are not empty of meaning; they geographically mark the places where the narrators saw Aja and James together and also point to the places people in the community frequented. The sidewalks, the corner store, the market, and the Dollar Tree are communal spaces that this apartment community share with one another. There is no theater, no mall, and no dance hall. Alief lacks a “discernible mass focus” such as these commercial public spaces, and thus is “one of the many near-invisible worlds that make up buried Houston” (Lopate 228).⁶

Washington refutes the belief that the gas station positioned at the corner of an intersection is negative, empty, and lacks a “discernible mass focus” (Lopate 228). In Alief, the corner store, the Dollar Store, the laundry mat, and the apartment complex are the mass focus of the community. These are the places where the community not only sees Aja and James together, but also the places where they gossip and eventually tell Paul about Aja’s infidelity: “Denise whispered it from the lot, Harold mumbled it in the hallway…. we spoke as one. A single cry, and then another. LaToya and Rodrigo and Caramella and Tyrell. In the laundry room, from the parking lot. From both ends of the stairwell” (Washington 15-16). The otherwise empty, negative spaces that lack a discernible mass are pulled into focus by the narrative of the community as they recall and vocalize the story of Aja, James, and Paul.

The lot, the hallway, and the laundry room are not only rendered positive through the place-making done by the apartment community, but these places are also rendered positive through the community’s collective recreation of the events leading to James’s murder in relation to place. The stories the community recalls and pieces together about Aja, James and Paul are ones that “didn’t have to be true” (7). The story came “after the fact” when “Charlie told Jacob, who heard it from Adriana. She took it from Rogelio, who’d been sort of fuckin Juana, and the two of them copped it to Nikki down the way. The details are tricky, the certainties muddled, but we knew enough of the story to recreate this: Aja on the mattress with James, in that liminal crease between strangers and lovers” (12). What matters is not the validity of the story but the ability of the community to co-create their own story. After the cops and paramedics come to arrest Paul and pick up James’s body, the complex is abuzz: “[i]t was dark before everyone slunk back home. Shouting and laughing and filling in the blanks” (19).  The community looks to the blanks spaces and fills them in with the positivity of their own stories. The semantic richness and positivity of “Alief” despite the murder and lack of hegemonic public spaces, such as a dance hall, are rooted in their collective and creative act of storytelling, not just through the fact they share a communal place that holds meaning. “Alief” privileges the story-making and place-making capabilities of its narrators, which in turn render the narrative positive, semantically rich, and suggest that this is a place that counts.

Even though there isn’t a dance hall, the Alief apartment community decides to hold a wake for James, because “despite everything, [he was] still one of us” (Washington 20). The narrators “pulled the change” for the party from “nowhere,” asking Mr. Po, Rogelio, Charlie, the Ramirez daughters, Adrianna, Neesha, Dante, Karl and Nigel, LaToya, Benito, and Hugo for money for James’s wake (Washington 20-21). The narrators use the collected funds to purchase decorations, buy food, and provide drinks: “[w]e hung streamers from the Balcony. Grilled wings from the first floor. Plugged speakers, pitched goalposts, sipped liquor, raised arms” (21). Rather than go out to a public dance hall, the tenants create their own dance hall to gather in celebration of James, Aja, and Paul. The hierarchization of spaces (as being positive or negative, as being full or empty, or as being semantically rich or poor) that renders niche spaces such as this Alief apartment complex as negative, empty, and invisible, is exploded by the fullness enacted through the communal gathering of the wake. The semantic richness of “Alief’” is best depicted through the texture and fullness of language used by and through the narrators:

And from the viejas to the juniors to the Filipinos to the black folks, we danced, danced, danced, to the tune of that story, their story, his story, our story, because we’d been gifted it, we’d birthed, we’d pulled it from the ashes. Aja was Aja and Paul was Paul and James was James and James was Paul and Aja was James and they were all us, and we told it, remixed it, we danced it from the stairwell, and we hung it from the laundry, and we shook it from the second floor, until our words had run out, until our music ran dry, and the Five-O shut it down on account of the noise. (Washington 21)

The repetition of “danced” creates a lyrical beat throughout the passage. The “that/their/his/our story” language draws attention to the collective “remixing” of the community’s story. The long, run-on sentences with repeating and circular language create an excess of meaning for the reader that is “birthed” from its semantic richness. The excess of this passage and the community’s wake is something that, unlike the prescribed space of the dance hall with its legal and commercial fun, has to be shut down by the police because it is too loud. The arrival of the police aligns with Merker’s assertion that if public behavior is not related to either commerce or economic production it is usually categorized as either “illegal and disruptive activity” or as an “assembly, celebration, and cultural spectacle” (Merker 50). The wake accomplishes both. It is an illegal celebration of an illegal activity.

The community’s largeness, richness, fullness, and positivity are so great that they must be brought back under the control of the hegemonic system that represses underprivileged neighborhoods in an effort to prevent the kinds of cognitive disruptions that inspire revolt against the repressive system. Even though the police shut down the party, this does not negate the semantic richness a narrative like “Alief” produces, nor does it negate the powerful influence such a narrative can have on perceptions of Houston and the many niche spaces within it. “Alief” is semantically rich both through its excess of language and through its ability to give placedness to a neighborhood typically rendered invisible because of its semantic poverty. In depicting a semantically rich Alief, Washington is gesturing toward a different kind of place that is in juxtaposition with the ‘typical’ Houston. It takes the view of Houston as commerce focused, violent, and empty, and reorients it towards communal, creative acts of self-narrative that rewrite the rules about what places count. It indicates that disenfranchised neighborhoods like Alief are capable of being as semantically rich as privileged places, even in a nowhere city like Houston.

 

Works Cited

Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008.

Elbein, Saul. “Saving the Mint.” Texas Observer, 5 July 2012, www.texasobserver.org/saving-the-mint/.

Esposito, Roberto. Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics. Fordham Univ. Press, 2013.

Garner, Dwight. “‘Lot’ Offers a Fictional Look at a Vibrant, Polyglot American City.” The               New York Times, 18 Mar 2019.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. “Deep in the Heart of Nowhere.” Literary Houston, edited by David Theis, TCU Press, 2010, pp. 219–225.

Lopate, Phillip. “Literary Houston.” Literary Houston, edited by David Theis, TCU Press,                    2010, pp. 226–240.

Luhmann, Niklas. Social Systems. Translated by John Bednarz, Stanford University Press, 1995.

Merker, Blaine. “Taking Place: Rebar’s Absurd Tactics in Generous Urbanism.” Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Routledge, 2010, pp. 45–58.

Theis, David, editor. “Introduction.” Literary Houston, TCU Press, 2010, pp. xiii-xvi.

Washington, Bryan. Lot: Stories. Riverhead Books, 2019.