Necessary optimism
After the film’s premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, Ms. Jaouad recalled someone in the crowd coming up to her and saying how relieved she was: “You’re still here.”
“When it comes to illness stories, we tell them from a survival perspective,” Ms. Jaouad said. In that sense, “American Symphony,” which falls short of an epilogue with white text and a black screen and offers no update on Ms. Jaouad’s health, is a corrective. “It wasn’t clear whether I would survive the shooting,” she said. The credits roll, but there is no happy ending for Ms. Jaouad and Mr. Batiste.
“None of us knows if we will exist in the future, but I have an increased fear of not existing in the future,” Ms. Jaouad said.
In “Between Two Kingdoms,” Ms. Jaouad writes about her exchanges with a man named Quintin Jones. Mr. Jones, who introduces himself to her as “Lil GQ,” read her columns while on death row. He had written from a place of recognition – from one captive person to another. After her transplant, she visited him in prison. But the week her book was published, he was given an execution date. Ms Jaouad was devastated. She campaigned for his death sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment. It did not work.
On the morning of his execution, Mr. Jones was allowed to talk on the phone for four hours. He spent it with Mr. Batiste and Ms. Jaouad. “It was incredible because we were speaking in the future tense and we knew the future wasn’t going to happen,” Ms. Jaouad said. “He talked about visiting us and hanging out in our garden. We all just chose to live in this space.” She tried to explain the lockdown. Your conscious decision to be outside of time.
Lately, Ms. Jaouad has been forcing herself to make plans. She sees it as an act of “necessary optimism” that she has committed to writing two more books. One will be a work of painting and prose that Ms. Jaouad has called “Drowning Practice.” The second book will be a journaling book that includes writing prompts. She will be showing her work at the ArtYard art center next summer.
A few weeks ago, Ms. Jaouad traveled to Seattle and was walking outside, suddenly in pouring rain. Someone rushed over to offer her an umbrella. “I thought, ‘No, I’m fine,'” Ms. Jaouad recalled. She wanted to feel the rain on her face. Back in New York, she let her imagination run wild. It’s not about awards or red carpets, but about one freak rainstorm in a decade. How incredible it would be not to feel new, she said. “When I’m around, I want the umbrella.”