Monday, March 29, 2010
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Accidental Undertakings
The process of birthing this play has brought to mind the value of the accidental undertaking--how there is little creative force in the planned. Creativity seems to flow from those unexpected journeys pieced together like cobble stones from events we have little power over. Like the way this play was conceived--during the twenty-year dissolution of a marriage. Like the way this play was written--as an attempt to fill an hour time slot at a religious conference after a last minute cancellation. Like the way the actors have been found--a chance encounter at an unrelated production. And Eureka! The means to interpret what chance has sealed with words.
Monday, March 1, 2010
The Interpreters
I never imagined that finding an actor to interpret a character relayed with words was as complex as finding those words to begin with.
There is so much that has to be considered. Can an actor's range encompass the peaks of joyful abandon after making an escape from years of abuse? Or the valleys of despair at witnessing the wounds carved into your being? What of the fleeting moments of resignation when you wake up from that dream of suffering his suffocating fury (as I did last night) to realize that you are still safe. Or even the troubling affliction of having moved six times in sixteen months yet 'home' still eludes you?
Who can we find to interpret such a joyful malady?
There is so much that has to be considered. Can an actor's range encompass the peaks of joyful abandon after making an escape from years of abuse? Or the valleys of despair at witnessing the wounds carved into your being? What of the fleeting moments of resignation when you wake up from that dream of suffering his suffocating fury (as I did last night) to realize that you are still safe. Or even the troubling affliction of having moved six times in sixteen months yet 'home' still eludes you?
Who can we find to interpret such a joyful malady?
Friday, February 19, 2010
The Retelling
Earlier today, while settling into a nap, I heard the voice of my novel's antagonist share the story of something he witnessed when he was three years old. It was a story I was all to familiar with. The event actually took place, many years ago, to a woman in the family of my HAT (husband at the time). Whenever he felt I wasn't suitably demonstrative, he told me how lucky I was that he didn't tie me to a tree, beat me, and leave me to die.
I knew the story so well, I almost didn't recognize the three year old telling from my novel's antagonist as he stood by as witness. How the rope wound its way up from the bottom of the tree, first crossing her ankles, then corkscrewing around her knees, her thighs, her waist, the bulge of her breasts. And how something deep within her stirred and she cried, "The rope is too tight. I cannot breathe!" And what it was like to live with the anger of wishing she had remained silent. And wishing he had been big enough and strong enough to protect her.
I learned something from the retelling of that tale. I don't just write to deconstruct all that has happened to me. I write to understand what it means to be that three year old; to witness harm befall your mother at the hands of your father and to know no means of solace, no means of escape.
I knew the story so well, I almost didn't recognize the three year old telling from my novel's antagonist as he stood by as witness. How the rope wound its way up from the bottom of the tree, first crossing her ankles, then corkscrewing around her knees, her thighs, her waist, the bulge of her breasts. And how something deep within her stirred and she cried, "The rope is too tight. I cannot breathe!" And what it was like to live with the anger of wishing she had remained silent. And wishing he had been big enough and strong enough to protect her.
I learned something from the retelling of that tale. I don't just write to deconstruct all that has happened to me. I write to understand what it means to be that three year old; to witness harm befall your mother at the hands of your father and to know no means of solace, no means of escape.
Monday, February 15, 2010
The Tale of a Title
Titles, to me, are magical, mystical creatures. Every literary project I've ventured upon has presented its title long before I begin to write.
To Dine with the Blameless Ethiopians snuck up on me as I was riding a train across the Namibian desert, hundreds of miles away from Ethiopia. The only Ethiopian I knew was the same age that I was--seventeen years old. She could hardly be blamed for anything, so there was no need to associate her with blamelessness. And I would not term our manner of eating from the food stalls along the side of the road, as proper dining.
And then I remembered a conversation I had with my father the year before. After receiving my admission to college, he told me I could defer college for a year to travel and serve as a youth volunteer anywhere in the world. Just name the place. I told him I wanted to go to France. He made a hard sell for Africa. I shared my cultural inhibitions with living in on a continent that I, as an African-American teen, preferred to distance myself from. And he shared with me a line from Homer's Iliad, where the ancient scribe described the Ethiopians in glowing terms. Homer spoke of them as beautiful and blameless and told tales of dining with them.
It was the impetus for my travels to southern Africa a year later, and served as the foundation for my ruminations on race, class, and identity. The title presented itself long before I knew I had a book to write. And so has been my process.
I have had similar apparitions with my unpublished novels. The one that has been with me the longest, through so many years of revisions that it no longer bears any resemblance to its original form, is The Train of the Decidedly Deceased. I now hardly remember much about the premise of the train, except that it served an obscure graveyard where militants were buried in unmarked graves. The story centered around the life of the boy who manned the graveyard since its inception as a graveyard for the pets of village children. It evolves into a graveyard for humans when an agnostic passes away, and neither the Muslim nor the Christian graveyards permit him to be buried on their property.
Needless to say, the novel of the graveyard met its own grave fate. But somewhere in the midst of exhaustive revisions, I realized that a sub plot so minor it barely covered a page was the real crux of the story--the story of the graveyard keeper's parents. His mother was from a village along the east coast of Africa, and his father was a Middle Eastern ship ledger. That they came to know one another at all, was on account of a most unusual promissory note between two business men who, in lieu of currency, promised the hands of their unborn offspring.
As the latest revision unfolds, a new title has presented itself--The Promissory Note--which I now trail behind like a hunter trying to keep up with her blood hound on some trail I can hardly imagine.
To Dine with the Blameless Ethiopians snuck up on me as I was riding a train across the Namibian desert, hundreds of miles away from Ethiopia. The only Ethiopian I knew was the same age that I was--seventeen years old. She could hardly be blamed for anything, so there was no need to associate her with blamelessness. And I would not term our manner of eating from the food stalls along the side of the road, as proper dining.
And then I remembered a conversation I had with my father the year before. After receiving my admission to college, he told me I could defer college for a year to travel and serve as a youth volunteer anywhere in the world. Just name the place. I told him I wanted to go to France. He made a hard sell for Africa. I shared my cultural inhibitions with living in on a continent that I, as an African-American teen, preferred to distance myself from. And he shared with me a line from Homer's Iliad, where the ancient scribe described the Ethiopians in glowing terms. Homer spoke of them as beautiful and blameless and told tales of dining with them.
It was the impetus for my travels to southern Africa a year later, and served as the foundation for my ruminations on race, class, and identity. The title presented itself long before I knew I had a book to write. And so has been my process.
I have had similar apparitions with my unpublished novels. The one that has been with me the longest, through so many years of revisions that it no longer bears any resemblance to its original form, is The Train of the Decidedly Deceased. I now hardly remember much about the premise of the train, except that it served an obscure graveyard where militants were buried in unmarked graves. The story centered around the life of the boy who manned the graveyard since its inception as a graveyard for the pets of village children. It evolves into a graveyard for humans when an agnostic passes away, and neither the Muslim nor the Christian graveyards permit him to be buried on their property.
Needless to say, the novel of the graveyard met its own grave fate. But somewhere in the midst of exhaustive revisions, I realized that a sub plot so minor it barely covered a page was the real crux of the story--the story of the graveyard keeper's parents. His mother was from a village along the east coast of Africa, and his father was a Middle Eastern ship ledger. That they came to know one another at all, was on account of a most unusual promissory note between two business men who, in lieu of currency, promised the hands of their unborn offspring.
As the latest revision unfolds, a new title has presented itself--The Promissory Note--which I now trail behind like a hunter trying to keep up with her blood hound on some trail I can hardly imagine.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
The End of a Print Run
While working on my new website with a designer, I track down the only link of available copies to my teenage memoir/travel narrative, To Dine with the Blameless Ethiopians. My British publisher has put them on sale for 95 pence (roughly a buck fifty. Excluding shipping).
No one imagines the end of a print run, or that their words, once written, have an expiration date.
No one imagines the end of a print run, or that their words, once written, have an expiration date.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Throat Chakra
This week my Yoga teacher is focusing on the throat chakra and all it encompasses including those yoga positions that encourage voice and expression. Until recently, I haven't given my throat much thought. But last month, on my way to Chicago for a photo shoot for the upcoming play, my voice went out. And aside from a few days of gruffness, it hasn't been back.
Secretly, I was hoping the trip to Chicago would jolt me out of my pre-production despondence. For a year, the final draft of the play had been waiting on my laptop and although I had a vague sense that there were things that could be done, proactive things such as marketing, facebooking, producing something new, nothing felt do-able. For one thing, my life wasn't turning out the way I expected. Case in point--for nearly six months now, my mother has been asking me what my "back up plan" is.
"My own back up plan," she proudly asserted, "was seamstressing." I asked her what she meant. "I always knew that if I couldn't find a job as an Urban Planner, I could make clothes."
It seemed irrelevant to state the obvious--I was an architect with over ten years experience. Architecture WAS my back up plan. Yet here I was, trying to navigate the tide of the neo Great Depression. Brilliantly unemployed. Who expects their back up plan to break? Each week, I send out well crafted resumes and abridged portfolios into the black hole which envelopes the hopes of so many disgruntled workers. And each week, I await calls that never come. Meanwhile, the pass time that I pursued in the thick of the night, investing in as one might a child for whom nothing more is expected other than the hope that it might grow up one day to achieve a measure of success, was all that was keeping me afloat. And the maturation of this hope was a terrifying prospect.
Throughout my life, usually at those junctures where I was in transition from one state to another, I have lost things of great importance to me. For instance, after spending a year trekking throughout southern Africa in a well worn pair of Birkenstocks, I accidentally left them under the bed at a bed and breakfast in Grand Haven, Michigan. I was on my honeymoon, and I rationalized that the loss symbolized the setting aside of my childhood for more grown up pursuits.
As I've grown older, I've come to find symbolic meaning in the loss of valuable things. And so I've given a great deal of thought to the loss of my voice; to what it might mean, on the cusp of such change and transition, to be forced to express myself through the written word. To be conjoined, by circumstance, to the passion I've nurtured in silence for so long.
And most surprising of all--in losing my voice, I may have actually found it.
Secretly, I was hoping the trip to Chicago would jolt me out of my pre-production despondence. For a year, the final draft of the play had been waiting on my laptop and although I had a vague sense that there were things that could be done, proactive things such as marketing, facebooking, producing something new, nothing felt do-able. For one thing, my life wasn't turning out the way I expected. Case in point--for nearly six months now, my mother has been asking me what my "back up plan" is.
"My own back up plan," she proudly asserted, "was seamstressing." I asked her what she meant. "I always knew that if I couldn't find a job as an Urban Planner, I could make clothes."
It seemed irrelevant to state the obvious--I was an architect with over ten years experience. Architecture WAS my back up plan. Yet here I was, trying to navigate the tide of the neo Great Depression. Brilliantly unemployed. Who expects their back up plan to break? Each week, I send out well crafted resumes and abridged portfolios into the black hole which envelopes the hopes of so many disgruntled workers. And each week, I await calls that never come. Meanwhile, the pass time that I pursued in the thick of the night, investing in as one might a child for whom nothing more is expected other than the hope that it might grow up one day to achieve a measure of success, was all that was keeping me afloat. And the maturation of this hope was a terrifying prospect.
Throughout my life, usually at those junctures where I was in transition from one state to another, I have lost things of great importance to me. For instance, after spending a year trekking throughout southern Africa in a well worn pair of Birkenstocks, I accidentally left them under the bed at a bed and breakfast in Grand Haven, Michigan. I was on my honeymoon, and I rationalized that the loss symbolized the setting aside of my childhood for more grown up pursuits.
As I've grown older, I've come to find symbolic meaning in the loss of valuable things. And so I've given a great deal of thought to the loss of my voice; to what it might mean, on the cusp of such change and transition, to be forced to express myself through the written word. To be conjoined, by circumstance, to the passion I've nurtured in silence for so long.
And most surprising of all--in losing my voice, I may have actually found it.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Possessive S
Although I've owned my Compaq laptop for five years, it didn't occur to me until last week to add possessive s to the dictionary so that spell check no longer identifies "Kemba's" as a grammatical infraction.
I remember the morning my laptop was presented to me--yet another act of contrition by my HATT (husband at the time) in an attempt to make amends for some act of warfare on the killing fields of my body that had, by then, become commonplace. He watched me warily as I opened it, daring me to object.
"This is too much money," I remember telling him. We were pressed to pay the mortgage on our historic-designated home, our SUV, and all the other trappings that bound us to a lifestyle as perilous as a house of cards. I had just announced that I wanted to take my writing more seriously; maybe even transitioning out of corporate architecture into editing or freelance writing.
"How much did it cost?" I asked.
"Don't worry about it," he said. "If you don't accept it, we'll both know you weren't serious about wanting to be a writer."
I knew enough to understand the subtly of threats that rest within polite platitudes. I felt resigned to accept it--this latest consolation prize in a war I was losing inch by inch. And when the bill came for our Best Buy account, I felt powerless to protest the $1800 laptop that was now mine to finance. The laptop that was, at least, portable enough to keep with me when my fortune finally changed and all that I owned was stripped away.
Fast forward to the now, sitting in the Plum Market coffee shop, writing a biography blurb for an upcoming play. And the line: "Kemba's formal training as an architect infuses her literary work with imagery that is both visually striking and spatially conscious," greets me with that indicator of a misspelled word--the squiggly red line. For the last five years, I've never even noticed how my laptop refused to accept the possessive s as a letter to be associated with my name. For the last five years, the notion of me possessing anything has been identified as a misnomer, and I never thought to correct it. Until now. I added, "Kemba's" to the dictionary and what rich symbolism existed within that simple measure; what rich symbolism in claiming what I am now free to possess--my life, my story, my name.
I remember the morning my laptop was presented to me--yet another act of contrition by my HATT (husband at the time) in an attempt to make amends for some act of warfare on the killing fields of my body that had, by then, become commonplace. He watched me warily as I opened it, daring me to object.
"This is too much money," I remember telling him. We were pressed to pay the mortgage on our historic-designated home, our SUV, and all the other trappings that bound us to a lifestyle as perilous as a house of cards. I had just announced that I wanted to take my writing more seriously; maybe even transitioning out of corporate architecture into editing or freelance writing.
"How much did it cost?" I asked.
"Don't worry about it," he said. "If you don't accept it, we'll both know you weren't serious about wanting to be a writer."
I knew enough to understand the subtly of threats that rest within polite platitudes. I felt resigned to accept it--this latest consolation prize in a war I was losing inch by inch. And when the bill came for our Best Buy account, I felt powerless to protest the $1800 laptop that was now mine to finance. The laptop that was, at least, portable enough to keep with me when my fortune finally changed and all that I owned was stripped away.
Fast forward to the now, sitting in the Plum Market coffee shop, writing a biography blurb for an upcoming play. And the line: "Kemba's formal training as an architect infuses her literary work with imagery that is both visually striking and spatially conscious," greets me with that indicator of a misspelled word--the squiggly red line. For the last five years, I've never even noticed how my laptop refused to accept the possessive s as a letter to be associated with my name. For the last five years, the notion of me possessing anything has been identified as a misnomer, and I never thought to correct it. Until now. I added, "Kemba's" to the dictionary and what rich symbolism existed within that simple measure; what rich symbolism in claiming what I am now free to possess--my life, my story, my name.
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