Oy!

[kareninlove]

Do we trust people’s capacity to be curious? Do we trust them to be in charge of themselves or not? Do we trust people to be inquisitive, to follow their own innate desire to investigate and seek knowledge or do we believe they need to be led?

Astra Taylor, Unschooled https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwIyy1Fi-4Q

[kareninlove]

Americanah and Writing Again

I finished today a novel I started over the holiday, Americanah. Following the birth, sleep, and revival of a love story between a Nigerian couple across oceans, I first wasn’t sure that I wanted to try it. It was a book about race, ostensibly. The main character, Ifemelu, moves to America to attend university and finds herself instead writing a self by writing a blog called “The Non-American Black.” In which she captures all those quiet moments of racism only apparent to someone non-affected by the history, present and culture of today’s United States. The irony lies in all that isn’t said and done. She sits and listens to Nina Simone in her New Haven apartment, much as I lie and listen to her now in my tiny Brooklynite of a room. Her very reason for writing, blogging, became my reason for no longer writing. Her self became too apparent. In her case, her self-righteous view of the world, the distant hauteur with which she described those around her, dutifully living their lives while she absorbed herself in dissecting their effort. Rather than turning the same critical lens to her own behavior, you see. Looking through my old journals, my blog posts typed out so precociously, my writing served to crystallize an intense sort of despair. There was a “stuck” quality to it; the awareness that I was writing on the same few topics, in the same narrow way, unable to see beyond it while knowing the world lay beyond it, barely obscured but rather as though through Sylvia Plath’s looking glass. I looked through my writing and saw in it a reflection of a self I didn’t like and didn’t want to identify with.

So the solution of course has been to not write.

But perhaps I will write again, if only to keep exploring and trust that in exploring I will end up further than if I had simply sat down one day by the signpost in the road and waited, given up, for someone else to come and claim me. (I wonder why I deprive myself of something I enjoy, writing. To think, I stopped because I didn’t find the result good enough? That’s not the point.)

Americanah intrigued me, even as it repelled me. A Nigerian from  middle-upper class Lagos meets a boy and falls in love. She moves to the States for university and falls into a depression so bleak she cannot think of speaking to him again. The letters stop, the phone goes unanswered and the emails go unread. A chasm opens between them, echoing the ocean that separates them. At the same time, she begins to heal and become an “Americanah.” She meets a wealthy white man and becomes his girlfriend; she cheats on him and meets an “American Black” and moves in with him; and then she finally goes back home, if it can still be called home, and falls back, par the course, to her obviously by now destined ‘one true love.’ He has lived life too, to be sure. He has left their home country to England, to work under the table as a janitor, then to be deported after an attempted sham marriage, before embracing wealth at home and a tepid if solid upper-class life.

What is the book about? It’s a love story, without focusing on the love. It is about race, untangling and pulling out, thread by thread, the many different kinds of black experience there are today and the tension that keeps them separate. Perhaps more than anything it is about  growing pains, though; it’s a universal story, of leaving home blinded by your imagined, inevitably brilliant future, sunshine and roses, then finding instead extreme personal, emotional difficulty. It’s a process of becoming, curious in how despite the different lives they must have led in the 15 years between meeting again they recognize instantly the same personalities and smiles they had when they were young. How much does a person change really, after all?

I had not wanted to read this book, as I said, because it brought up the race question yet again. So often with these conversations I wonder, “What’s the point?” If there is nothing you can do about it, as there was little I could do after Treyvon Martin, then why even bring it up as though it were balloon that when released would make a wish come true? Sometimes it’s enough to bear witness, I guess, and even as Ifemelu writes a blog on race as an outsider she at least writes what she sees.

“You know why Ifemelu can write that blog, by the way?” asks Shan. “Because she’s African. She’s writing from the outside. She doesn’t really feel all the stuff she’s writing about. It’s all quaint and curious to her. So she can write it and get all these accolades and get invited to give talks. If she were African-American, she’d just be labelled angry and shunned.”

Today I went on the Snow Bus and the coordinator was African, perhaps from Nigeria as well, the slightest of accents and overall purely American. That glass pane between the African and the African-American came out so clearly, as her easy-going conversation and energy, a fluid way of going between people and introducing herself, laughing so freely would never have happened between an African-American and anyone on that bus of white hipsters from Williamsburg.

So the conversation continues.

[kareninlove]

I wish I could show you When you are lonely or in darkness The astonishing light of your own being.

Hafiz

[kareninlove]

His dynamic, captivating and strangely beautiful bowling form #day22 #100happydays

[kareninlove]

Tea time with these fine folks #day19 #100happydays

[kareninlove]

Waiting for their human #100happydays #day14

[kareninlove]

Puppy kisses! #100happydays #day13

[kareninlove]

There's a life lesson here somewhere. #leaveon #day12 #100happydays

[kareninlove]

Early morning light through my window #day11 #100happydays

[kareninlove]

Cooking in a darkened kitchen #day10 #100happydays

[kareninlove]

#latergram

[kareninlove]

Lone leaf on the ground Crimson against grey cement Shadow long and tall #100happydays #day9 #haiku

[bindercon]

12 Essential Essays for Writers

tetw: “ On Keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion - A great essay about making notes that gets to the very core of the writing process Write Like a Motherfucker by Cheryl Strayed - Raw, emotional advice on…

Some great women writers join ranks on this list: Joan Didion, Cheryl Strayed, Zadie Smith, Jamaica Kincaid - just to name a few!

[kareninlove]

Balloons and a bow tie #100happydays #day7

[kareninlove]

An unexpected dance surprise #latergram

[kareninlove]

The way the light reflects on a wet sidewalk, rainy day be damned #100happydays #day6

[kareninlove]

Woke up early and went for a light jog through the park - enjoying seeing the leaves change #100happydays #day5