James O'Brien

James O'Brien is a writer covering the aftermath of violence in Oakland, California. From 2015 to 2023 he was senior writer at Youth ALIVE!, Oakland's anchor agency for street-based violence prevention and intervention programs, like Caught in the Crossfire, Violence Interruption and homicide response. Currently, O’Brien is working on a book about Marilyn Washington Harris of Oakland. For more about Marilyn, the fundamental human and civic right to support and healing after violence which she brought to first light, and the selfless act of love she invented, please see the article, No Escape, No Surrender, or the many items about her life and work on O’Brien’s blog, Ice City Almanac.

 

Born on the Mason-Dixon Line, a middling student in a middling town in the middle of a mid-Atlantic state, last son of an upper lower-middle-class family living in an indistinct house in an unremarkable suburb, borders are the places where O’Brien lives, in what the poet Montale called “the sordid limbo of maimed existences,” refusing to be categorized, not out of rebellion, or confidence in some personal singularity, but toeing the borderlines so that no one will know what he thinks, or feels, or wants, or plans to do. Often he doesn’t know or allow himself to know what he thinks, feels, or even what he is planning to do. He will literally drive away from his house unsure where he’ll stop. He insists on piercing every swell of anger with doubt and then, convinced by doubt, declines to express himself. Ambivalence is O’Brien’s organizing principle. Often it manifests in dissimulation; he has developed a sense of humor so dry that, frequently, even his wife of thirty years, even his best friends, can’t tell when he is being serious, or when he is not. He has existed for years on the border in jobs, with God, in relationships, buying time by seeming to approach a country, then settling comfortably in a demilitarized zone, responsible but not engaged, engaged but not yet committed, praying hard while spiritually in the dark, waiting for some cosmic UN to tell him where to land or who he is. Instead of resulting in a perverse safety from opinion and reaction, the border life has left him unknown, in hiding, frozen off trail, roiling in obscurity. It has caused great, even insurmountable difficulty in all his writing, where it is imperative he find and tell the truth as he sees it. It’s the inner borders, the places where choices and decisions are chewed over but not made, that are the most familiar places for him. Regardless of the pain, the ennui, the eternal, calculated nothingness that rule those borders, he comes to them like coming home. Surely, to others, he is less of an enigma than he likes to imagine, but if he has been successful at anything, it is that he has lived a subtle life.