‘TIRED OF #HOUSTONSTRONG’: How Houston’s poet laureate captured the city’s collective grief

Three days after Hurricane Beryl knocked out power for millions, scrambled cell phone signals and cut off internet access across Houston, the city’s poet laureate turned to social media.

“Houston homies!” Aris Brown called out on Instagram, the only consistent way she had of connecting with the outside world. “I feel like writing a collective poem archiving our grief in this moment post hurricane – would love for all of you to be a part of it.”

Brown hoped to connect to her neighbors, to “archive Houstonians’ stories through poetry.”

In 24 hours, residents flooded her with over 70 responses. Some wrote single words. Others sketched out lines of their own poetry. Many described destroyed neighborhoods and demanded better responses from the city, state and CenterPoint Energy — while also professing a deeper trust in kind, helpful neighbors.

The one unifying thread: They were tired of being asked to be Houston Strong.

“People’s approach to this poem was, ‘I want to be heard, and I want it to be clear,’’ Brown said Tuesday. “And that was exciting.”

So Brown quickly went to work, weaving together their responses deep into the night.
On Saturday, two days after her callout, Brown published TIRED OF #HOUSTONSTRONG on Instagram, hoping to spark collective action in her city.

“I think this particular poem itself showcased an energy in Houston. People are already doing the work, people know how to tell their stories,” she said. “People are aware of what is going on. It’s not this hopeless, meaningless, pointless space. It’s a people who know exactly what’s going on and know exactly what to ask.”

Phillip Burton

“ the rain came and I couldn’t do shit
about it.”

The morning of Hurricane Beryl, Phillip Burton drove through heavy wind and rain in south Houston to get to his job managing an LA Fitness. After 10 minutes on the road, before he made it to the freeway, a truck in a neighboring lane slid into the side of Burton’s 2007 Toyota Camry, nicknamed Preach. The collision pushed Preach to the curb, leaving some blemishes and scratch marks, while the truck driver sped off without stopping.

“I just went ahead and I called my boss. I was like, ‘Nope!” said Burton, 25.

Burton returned to his apartment in the shadow in the Astrodome, dejected from the crash. And it would only get worse.

Burton spent a couple of days with no power. He couldn’t get juice into his phone because his car charger didn’t work. He ran low on gas, then realized at the pumping station that all of his money was in a savings account. When he went to transfer money, he remembered his phone was dead.

When Burton saw Aris’ call out for a word, phrase or sentence that represented the experience of Beryl, he thought “perfect.”

“The anger about it. That’s why I said (my line),” Burton said. “‘Cause we just can’t do anything about it. It just happened. What can we really do?”

Hamza Abuharb

“ Unity in our struggle.”

“When the power went out Monday, it sent me back,” said Hamza Abuharb, a poet and law student from Missouri City.

Abuharb, a 22-year-old Palestinian, moved to the Houston area in the fifth grade after being stuck in Gaza during the 50-day war of 2014. When Beryl hit, it knocked out his family’s power for the first time since moving to Missouri City, so Abuharb bought them a radio like they used to depend on in the Middle East.

Abuharb, his parents, and his 77-year-old grandmother — who just escaped the war in Gaza — gathered around the device.

“They spent all this time and effort to evacuate my grandma from Gaza, they did all of that work, and they’ve worked all their lives for a one-night hurricane to completely upend their whole week and their whole month,” Abuharb said.

Their frustration quickly turned to a plan for action when Abuharb’s mother decided she wanted to air her grievances directly to Houston’s City Council.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, you should!’” Abuharb said. “You should take all your friends with you. … I’ll write the script.”

In the aftermath of Beryl, Abuharb couldn’t stop thinking about the plight of Palestine, as well as places in the U.S., like Flint, Michigan, where the government had failed to offer basic utilities.

It’s not too late for Houston, he thought. Houstonians could still make a difference.

“I saw that we have a lot more in common, that Houstonians have a lot more in common with the people of Gaza, people of Palestine, than they do with the people in charge,” Abuharb said. “And so that’s what I say when there’s a unity in struggle.”

Francisco Castro

“The heat takes
my breath away and not in a fun way”

When Hurricane Ike wiped out power in Houston more than 15 years ago, Francisco Castro’ was a teenager with a mother going through chemotherapy. The outages left Castro’s ailing mother uncomfortable in the September heat — a memory that came back to him last week, as he worried about others with similar struggles through Beryl.

When Castro’s lights came on three days after Beryl hit, the 28-year-old opened his air-conditioned apartment to as many people as possible, ultimately housing a few friends. He also emerged to talk with neighbors, sometimes chatting for hours.

“I learned I have a neighbor who was a musician,” Castro said. “We got to talking about music a lot, and that was a nice way of connecting. It’s kind of a shame that it takes things like this to get you to talk to your next-door neighbor.”

In his line for Aris’ poem, Castro wanted to convey the collective frustration of Houston struggling through the heat with no power. As a kid in the Dominican Republic, power went out frequently, but never for long. In Latin America, politicians would face more pressure to fix things, he said.

“We’re all very angry right now,” Castro said. “And anger is important, because a lot of important things we have accomplished justice-wise have had an element of anger attached to them. But I also would like for us as a city to be intentional and tactful with our anger.”

Claudia Obeid Limongi

“A city built on insurmountable lies.”

When Claudia Obeid Limongi went to sleep the Sunday before Beryl’s winds began whipping over her home in Sugar Land, she wasn’t too concerned. Instead, she wondered why folks were preparing for the worst.

Her newly built home had easily withstood Hurricane Harvey and the other natural disasters which hit the Houston region, so she didn’t think a Category 1 storm would cause much chaos.

But when she opened her eyes on Monday morning, she was surprised to see the lights were out. Her shock grew by the hour as the clock ticked from three hours to three days without power.

By the time Obeid Limongi saw Brown’s callout on Instagram, frustration had mounted into fury.

In the storm, the 30-year-old lost internet — essential for running her business offering English and Spanish classes — and the food she and her husband had prepared for the week. In the energy capital of the world, she couldn’t find gas. She felt a lack of support from the government and her neighbors alike.

“So it was kind of like, okay, now we’re out of money on both ends. And then he couldn’t work either,” she said. “And so losses, a lot of losses, and it made me angry.”

Obeid Limongi said she wrote “insurmountable lies” because she had already felt her former employer, Houston ISD, lied after the state takeover that upended the district. And when politicians dismissed her advocacy to end the war in Palestine while claiming to listen to the community. And now, in the wake of the storm, the state of the city’s infrastructure makes her feel lied to once more.

“We do pay a lot of taxes, but we don’t see it back to us, like we don’t see it in our education, we don’t see it in our roads, ” she said. “… It feels like we’re at a point of no return at this point — and they just keep lying to keep us quiet.”

But when she saw the poem, she said, she felt the opposite of dismissed. She felt seen.

Steven Wu

“We pool our resources
to protect our people”

Steven Wu has a long history with storms.

At age 13, he was living in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. Then he moved to Houston, where he faced hurricanes Rita and Harvey. Wu thought the latter megastorm would be a watershed moment for the city.

“I was completely wrong,” said Wu, 32. “The same problems I saw in 2005 happened in 2017. People, especially those who are poor, those who don’t speak English, those who are immigrants, those who are Black and brown, are continuously left behind.”

Now, Wu works as the organizing and policy director at Woori Juntos, a Houston nonprofit that advocates for immigrant families. After Beryl tore through Houston, he found himself again in the aftermath of a crisis. His organization transformed its office into a cooling center and raised money for undocumented families who don’t qualify for federal aid.

Multiple families called to ask him for help as a mediator between younger relatives and seniors as old as 90, who refused to leave their sweltering apartments six days into power outages.

Wu wished leaders would find better ways to support the vulnerable, first by helping to convince individualistic Texans to accept support, but also by moving money from traditional public safety initiatives like the police to basic needs like generators at senior facilities.

He also wants the government to hold companies like CenterPoint accountable.

“I think when Aris first asked people to [submit to the poem], the first thought was I really don’t like the term ‘Houston Strong’ anymore,” Wu said. “In my opinion, that phrase has become a symbolic and tangible form of our local and state and federal government abdicating any sense of responsibility to help the people.”