The World Moves On . . .

I wrote this on Sunday, July 14, 2013.  I posted it in a note on facebook and didn't tag anyone to it.  Sometimes you just have to release your thoughts to the universe and let them marinate, you know.  I still do not have words enough of my own to express what I want to express-but I still want to share.

Art by Tes One available from sold out on 1xrun.com and made free use on his website

The World Moves On . . . but I haven't.  Not yet. 

I'm just going to . . . . feel this for a very long time.

Today began and ended just like yesterday.  There was work to be done and we did it.  There were meals to eat, plans to make, and life to live and we did all that too, but I just can't stop thinking.  I can't stop thinking and I can't begin to articulate my own thoughts.

Then I found this and I thought, "of course".  Did you know James Baldwin and Audre Lorde interviewed each other for Essence in 1984?  Did you know that they both have an undeniable talent for applying words to meaning?

Emphasis added, bold and italics, is mine.

James Baldwin: One of the dangers of being a Black American is being schizophrenic, and I mean ‘schizophrenic’ in the most literal sense. To be a Black American is in some ways to be born with the desire to be white. It’s a part of the price you pay for being born here, and it affects every Black person. We can go back to Vietnam, we can go back to Korea. We can go back for that matter to the First World War. We can go back to W.E.B. Du Bois – an honorable and beautiful man – who campaigned to persuade Black people to fight in the First World War, saying that if we fight in this war to save this country, our right to citizenship can never, never again be questioned – and who can blame him? He really meant it, and if I’d been there at that moment I would have said so too perhaps. Du Bois believed in the American dream. So did Martin. So did Malcolm. So do I. So do you.That’s why we’re sitting here.

Audre Lorde: I don’t, honey. I’m sorry, I just can’t let that go past. Deep, deep, deep down I know that dream was never mine. And I wept and I cried and I fought and I stormed, but I just knew it. I was Black. I was female. And I was out – out – by any construct wherever the power lay. So if I had to claw myself insane, if I lived I was going to have to do it alone. Nobody was dreaming about me. Nobody was even studying me except as something to wipe out.

James Baldwin: You are saying you do not exist in the American dream except as a nightmare.

Audre Lorde: That’s right. And I knew it every time I opened Jet, too. I knew that every time I opened a Kotex box. I knew that every time I went to school. I knew that every time I opened a prayer book. I knew it, I just knew it.

Just read the whole thing.

 

What Am I Doing? What Are We Doing?

I started this blog as a writing exercise and a creative outlet.  I also really enjoyed reading blogs.  I had this sense that they were letting me into hundreds of individual realities and hence, providing an authentic look at multiple lives as they are lived by real people.  This despite the plethora of Pinterest ready homes, recipes, DIY projects, and obsession with Anthropologie.  Behind all of that was real motivation and human action.  There has to be something behind this really specific, softly lit nostalgia right?

The thing is . . . even though I was into that whole deal, my life, my real life interfered. My real life looked nothing like what I scrolled across in my news feed.  At times, the Davis execution and the Zimmerman trial specifically, the disconnect is jarring.  How is the whole world not thinking or talking about this? Why is there nothing . . . not one mention in comments even, about Trayvon Martin on my favorite parenting blog?  The comforting community of Pinterest addicts and lovers of glossy white trim began to feel a little less welcoming.  A little less congenial.  A little less relevant. 

Then it hit me, maybe I'm just too black for this life.

Sometimes the assumed universality of my favorite sites is just too much to bear.  It's nothing major.  (No, we don't all want to laugh at Sweet Brown.  Your use of hip hop slang for comedic effect is more than just incredibly whack, although I really can't stress enough how whack . . . .)  It's not overtly racist, but the absence of any sort of cultural awareness of any kind has me instinctively bracing for impact.  (Because not really racist and not overtly racist still hold potential for violence.)  Especially when the world at large has seemingly become more hostile than usual.

Maybe I just don't fit in here.

I haven't been posting.  

I haven't been posting because I can't write.  More to the point I can't write the way I assume blogs should be written.  I can't write the way the popular bloggers I follow do.  I can't write in ways that either unconsciously or conscientiously avoid controversy.  I can't write that way, even though I would like to write that way and have that soft focus, beautiful life-at least in print.  

My writing can't assume universality because my blackness and my femaleness and my general poor-ness get in the way.  I can't write about aspirational furniture, or DIY projects when I have all this blackness in the way.  I can't write about being married without all my blackness, and accompanying respectability politics, getting in the way.  I can't write about step-parenting because my husband's blackness gets in the way and makes it less about parenting and more about how men, allegedly, don't stay with or take care of their children.  I can't write about feminism because my blackness and my insistence on being included, get in the way.  I can't write about beauty, especially hair, without including my blackness.  I can't write about politics because my blackness makes me predisposed to high blood pressure and other stress-related diseases.  

I can't classify my blog as one thing or another because I am not one thing or another.  My whole world is not about blackness . . .  but, come on now, my whole world is about blackness.

My whole world is also about gender, about socioeconomics, about misrepresentation, about misrecognition, about advocacy, about shame, and about silence . . .  crushing silence.

I have felt silenced by the overwhelming representation of ordinary life.

So I haven't been writing.

I have been working, and teaching, and struggling towards making some kind of life and having some kind of family.  Trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.  Trying to not go gray in vain (!).  Trying to keep a handle on my sanity and my sense of self in a world that feels, at times, like it's going mad.  

I haven't been writing, but I have not been idle.  I can't write . . . but I'm going to write anyway.