I Am Glad...

I spend my days doing RA work and working on an essay due Jan 3rd. My essay is on Djanet Sears' HARLEM DUET and Aime Cesaire's A TEMPEST, both are incredibly important plays for black theatre and postcolonial studies.

I am glad that my blog has inspired friends on a conscious level (those who have come to me and said so and those who haven't). I am also grateful that they have encouraged me to keep writing and thankful for their kind words about talent that i didn't know i had. I hope that i can (and will try my best to) live up to those expectations and good wills.

I am always thinking about "stuff" and sometimes i am most inspired by the silent, nonspoken realities of people's lives which don't get covered-- whether in the media, literature, normative Truths--where ever it is out there. How do we live and make sense of our lives? What causes us to live past pain, and why do we exactly? My blog is a way for me to make sense, especially my creative blogs, of the things that i don't exactly understand precisely because of their complicatedness. It is always a strive towards an understanding of someone or something; of voice, pain, love, history, race, gender, class, poverty, death, birth, survival. Aime Cesaire says that he became a poet by rejecting poetry, French poetics. I think that reflects my consciousness as a writer of sorts. On the one hand, writing for me is healing, and on the other, it is an outright rejection of the mainstream western way of "doing" poetry. I never liked studying poetry because of the genre bound rigidity and technicality of how it has been taught. But i love a poem that makes me think, long after i've read it and closed the book; in a way, that's also how i feel about novels which is why i approach a novel like a poem and a poem like a novel.