When you experience the most humiliating moment of your life and you're a writer, you write about it. You push your public self aside in favor of your writer self. You sacrifice face in order to gain as a writer. Because your life is lived in order to gain experience that can yield material. Yes, your proudest moments can lead to great writing but your most embarrassing moments will almost always lead to great writing that people will want to read because it'll force you to challenge who you are. This is video of me reading about the most humiliating moment of my life, when someone said, "You ain't Black," and how it forced me to go deep inside and figure out who I am. I thought about not writing about it. Then realized I had to. This moment has shaped the rest of my life and is the genesis of my book Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?
Published on July 26, 2011 20:22