Writer's Notebook @writersnotebookphd - Tumblr Blog

Free Write

What is in front of me? Behind? On the side? Over, under, near, and far all create space. Space. Aliens and the unknown are out there. This makes no sense right now, but I am writing because I need; because I have to; because I am supposed to. This is long and windy and still not making any sense. This is how I feel about my work--sometimes. Plugging along, trying to figure it all out. I was told to use the Pomodoro Technique and that is what I am doing right now, but because my writing is not targeted or specific, it does not feel like I am completing anything. But again, I am battling writer’s block, which I know has nothing to do with my actual writing and everything to do with my being fearful. I get it, yes. I am looking at the timer on my phone and my time is about to be up. Just 3 minutes. 3 minutes. I am done.

#free write

Where there is woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits. Indigo seldom spoke. There was a moon in her mouth. Having a moon in her mouth kept her laughing. Whenever her mother tried to pull the moss off her head, or clip the roses around her thighs, Indigo was laughing. Mama, if you pull ‘em off, they’ll just grow back. It’s my blood. I’ve got earth blood, filled up with Gee-chees long gone, and at the sea.

Ntozake Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

This, and my trip to New Orleans last summer are two of the catalysts for my project. I call it a project, not a book or a story, because it is not those things anymore. It is much bigger/weirder than that. It is winding around my hands, head, and heart in a way that I cannot fully understand.

It is becoming what I want it to be: real, fantasy, true, fiction, past, future, but more importantly intergenerational.

#ntozake shange #sassafrass cypress and indigo

Genres

Initially, I decided that this work for this class would be a graphic novel, but it is such a mash up of genres right now that I have no clue. This is just a thought I wanted to jot down for posterity.

#genres

Craft Talk

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Pauline Hopkins.

It took me some time to figure out what I wanted to talk about. Last term I talked explicitly about Afrofuturism and this term I wanted to stretch it more. My exploration of AF is really outside of the primary science/tech/digital discourse that most of the conversations and work falls into. I think that this is also why I had writer’s block--not seeing myself truly reflected in the mass of work, only on the margins, is scary.

But I digress.

I know that I am on to something and am firmly rooted in moving forward to break new(ish) ground. So, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Pauline Hopkins. They are two of my literary sheroes. To be Black women producing literary work in the US from the mid-18th century on is astounding to me. They firmly placed themselves in the midst of the US’s infancy and created conversations that dealt with the future of Black people, particularly Black women. They are the foremothers of literary AF. They understand alienation, liminality, and what it means to have your personhood be speculative.

#Frances Ellen Watkins Harper #Pauline Hopkins

Who is Alana?

Alana B. is a composite of several women I know, one of them being a close friend whose name she shares. Her physically is based off of her, particularly her complexion and her hair. Psychologically, she is me. She is very much me in the way I think, act, and react. Who she is at her core is me.

I introduce her mother, and grandmother, though I don’t say so yet and her mother literally is me, and her grandmother is my mother. Her experiences in the story are based off of mine, and my mother’s and others are totally fictionalized.

She really is a strong character, though we still know only a little about her. She is going to navigate her way through a lot in the world and it will all be past, future, present--sometimes all converging at once. I am not sure where this is going, but I am back to enjoying it.

I have writer’s block. Blockety block, block block. This is all I have in terms of my writing for this course and this notebook. I am writing gibberish right now, at least as far as I am concerned. i want to not be blocked. It is the new, awesome, job. My body and mind are trying to get with the program. I am blocked. It will be fine.

#writer's block

Coded as a cross, a quartered circle or diamond, a seashell spiral, or a special cross with solar emblems at each ending - the sign of the four moments of the sun is the Kongo emblem of spiritual continuity and renaissance par excellence. In certain rites it is written on the earth, and a person stands upon it to take an oath, or to signify that he or she understands the meaning of life as a process shared with the dead below the river or the sea - the real sources of earthly power and prestige, in Kongo thinking... The intimation, by shorthand geometric statements, of mirrored worlds within the spiritual journey of the sun, is the source and illumination of some of the more important sculptural gestures and decorative signs pertaining to funerary monuments and objects designated for deposit on the surface of funerary tombs, or otherwise connected with funerary ceremonies and the end of life.

Robert Farris Thompson

On Contents and Cosmograms

Tiphanie Yanique’s contents sections are:

Freedom

Belonging

A Freedom

A Belonging

Drown

The BOMB

Love

Index/Appendix

Simplified, a cosmogram looks like this:

The horizontal like separates the spiritual (upper) from the material (lower). It is a space used to work out a host of issues, individual, family, community.

Eight sections. Two turns around the cosmogram. Moving counterclockwise, mimciking the movement of the sun through the sky, Yanique’s 8 sections represent, to me, birth, rebirth, movement and completion -- for the Virgin Islands, her family, and the colonization process. Two movements around the cosmogram, each section acting as its own bequest or prayer to the gods with the final section, the Index, being secret knowledge revealed.

#Tiphanie Yanique #cosmogram #Land of Love and Drowning

This semester is tough. I am not sure what to write right now. Comprehensive Exam Brain is a thing. Actually, I think it is a combination of completion fatigue and the high of passing that has me discombobulated.

I really hope this counts as an entry. I am tearing what little bit of hair I have out. Grrrr.

#comp brain #exhaustion #adrenaline #i am going cray

I see everything through the lens of Afrofuturism. Everything.

Reading Yanique’s epic reminded me of how truly connected the descendants of the Diaspora were/are, but more importantly, how images, themes, and metaphors that link the diaspora to Africa can occur and reoccur.

I am looking a lot at narrative, memory, and re-memory, particularly how memory is stored in the body--particularly the memories of your ancestors. In reading Love and Drowning, I saw the islands as the scattered children of slavery’s aftermath, the water as both a connector to the spirit world, and a link of past to present.

Ancestral secrets and lies are literally living in the present-day/1970s characters. Then there is the double colonization--from European to America--and the liminal space that creates for the island and its inhabitants. the “Doubting Thomasina” wants me to believe that I am reaching in terms of how I see/read the book, but in my quest to remove so much of the cyber and technoculture from Afrofuturism, particularly in my desire to link the American arm to a specific culture, this book makes me think that I am really on to something with my claims.

I am planning to re-read the novel over the summer because I do think that it has a place for brief exploration in my dissertation.

#tiphanie yanique #The Land of Love and Drowning

On HOPE.

I have read about half of The Impossible Will Take A Little While: perserverance and hope in troubled times.

I am hopeful.

I think that my work and way of being are hopeful.

A couple of terms ago, I read Ernest Bloch’s Principle of Hope along with several other articles that help explain, expand, and contextualize the dense Bloch. It sort of troubled me that some of my colleagues in this course have said that they are not hopeful. I get it, but I was a troubled. Yes, a few of the readings can seem sappy, but they are all joyful, some with humor, and all are sincere.

Recently, a friend told me that I have a persistent joy. As a human, there are times when I not joyful, happy, or even hopeful. In fact, I have been downright melancholy. However, there is still an undercurrent of hopefulness. for me, it is linked to the fact that I am a descendant of people who survived the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, and later America’s Peculiar Institution, Reconstruction, Jim Crow...I mean, they were Black folks in a country that tends to love Black culture, not the folks responsible for it. And they survived, and I am here. And I have produced another generation. Hope is almost a given.

I think that this is why/how I have latched on/found a home within Afrofuturism.

#hope #The Impossible Will Take A Little While: perserverance and hope in troubled times #Paul ragat Loeb #ernest bloch

"Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice (2015)“Black Quantum Futurism (or BQF) is a new approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in...

Research. This term, more of my posts are about process than about what we read. Actually, it is closer to 50/50. I have had to come to terms with the idea that I am absolutely fascinated, more like obsessed, with black speculative and science fiction. So much so, that it is impacting my daily life in terms of thinking of constructions of blackness, liminality, space, blackness as a technology, and how this is even further complicating by gender, disability, and neuro-atypical folks.

My heroine jumps through time, not like the show Quantum Leap, but rather she feels her way into other times and places. She does not imagine herself in these places or try to go there (at least not initially), it is when that she is feeling most free, detached from the world around her, and connected with something greater, that she takes the leap. She is in a state of bliss, and at some points, ecstacy when she leaves her body. Pleasure is the catalyst. Pleasure is power. What is more radical than a black woman channeling pleasure into something as immense as time travel?

#Black quantum futurism #time travel #astro blackness

I don't want to lose her form the pageant of humankind.

Diane Ackerman, “A Slender Thread”

I found this line to be absolutely gorgeous. In thinking of my own writing for this term, I began to list the primary participants in my own pageant:

Alana: Female, AA, 30′s at the beginning of the story, born just after Hurricane Katrina

Gatherers (Zion, Jay, Zenzele): Female, Male, Trans, AA, all ages, concentrated in NOLA, but dispatched across the country as needed

Dean: Female, AA, middle to late 80s, lives in SC

Joshua: Male, AA, died at age 90, spirit guide

Rebekah: Female, AA, died at age 85, spirit guide

Rufus: Male, AA, 75, lives in SC, guide and transporter

There are several small ancillary characters, but I am not sure who they fully are yet, or what their roles entail, but my pageant is vivid and growing.

#diane ackerman #quotes

I am writing and rewriting. I am editing and thinking. More than that, I am scared. I have, at it’s core, what I know to be the foundation of a very good piece. Whether it becomes a graphic novel, traditional literary texts, or something else, I don’t know.

To write this, I have strayed outside of my comfort zone--away from memoir, creative non-fiction and the like. This is coming from a completely different place and is inspired by something much greater than I am. I know this sounds woo woo, but I believe in the woo woo. Post trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, my families roots are in South Carolina (Low Country), New Orleans, and Jamaica. That’s some deep Black woo woo for you. Generations of it. And now, at this time in my life, I am in contact with it in ways that I had not been before.

So what does this have to do with writing?

Everything that I am writing, thinking, and feeling comes from those spaces. It is ancestral, an understanding, and a knowing that I cannot explain. Perhaps it is my constant digging and searching about Afrofuturism for my dissertation? I do not know, but yet I do.

The only thing that I am sure of is that I am writing what I am supposed to write. And I guess that is all I need to know, for now.

#writing #process #woo woo

And that’s when I know that I am on the right track. It is this feeling, this sensation, that alerts me to take action. Some have called me crazy, and that might be true, but I say it’s God and the angels talking to me. They talk to everyone, but most don’t take the time to listen. They are so busy going about their daily lives, mired in the muck of life, that they can’t hear them. But I do. I make sure that I take time to hear them. I ask them questions and they respond with the feeling. Every morning before I leave the house, I sit quietly near my window, legs and back straight, arms at my side, and ask Archangel Michael to protect me with his blue light. Each time, I get the feeling. It begins at the top of my head and moves down my body.

Watching them go about their business in town, was sometimes like watching a live version of the walking dead. Eyes glazed over, sluggish steps, and slow speech were also side effects from the experiment. Now, not everyone had these same effects, some were just the same as they had been prior, except or that one part of their memory that had been erased. This is what most of them had hoped for, the memories wiped away like a parent clearing a tear from a child’s cheek. The older ones had it worst since they had received the brunt of the trauma.

#the experiment

The cabin was supposed to be completed, at least the windows, before Thanksgiving. We know it’s not the builders fault nor ours as these things tend to happen. I’ve been coming here every winter, and most summers, with my family since I was a child. these mountains hold many memories for me--some good, others not, but mostly good. I’ve always known that I wanted to live here, be here, year round.

#Hannah In The Mountains

Onward

I am really excited about what I am writing now and am looking forward to turn in the final draft. I am also looking forward to working on it next term in Creative Writing II, which is the final course I need for the certificate in Creative Writing -- woot!

Barring all of that goodness, I am really grateful to feel that I am stepping into work that is more me. If it were not for my mother and her love of science fiction and fantasy, I would probably never have stumbled into Afrofuturism. I am thankful that my first movie theater experiences were Star Wars, The Wiz, the Flash Gordon, in that order, and that I have access to utopian/dystopian/Afrofuturism from across the diaspora in both visual and print media.

After all of this, what is even more interesting are the possibilities of Afrofuturism as a critical framework and an understanding it’s genealogy. Coming to a close in my studies at Union, plus all of my ideas beginning to congeal for both my scholarly work and my work in the world is bringing me both relief and excitement.

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