…is how the great poet and playwright Derek Walcott characterized the heart of a writer’s struggle, our internal mark of achievement and satisfaction, over a lifetime.  What does this mean in a literary world held captive by the MFA industry, surveilled by government agencies, policed by the comforts of whiteness, maleness and empire, and molded by academic trends that not only inflect little of the everyday person’s besiegement by debt and meaninglessness, but are in fact fully complicit in reproducing that misery at a grand scale (witness the plight of adjunct faculty)?  I also wonder at a practical level, what does this mean when I don’t read and write in my native tongue, but in a language designed to subjugate and exile me from my history? It’s rather like trying to find one’s true reflection in a house of distorting mirrors.

I don’t have any resolutions, but I think these are questions worth wrestling with.  As an early writer, I believed that my reasons for writing had to do with socially just reasons (which makes sense because women and people of color do not have moral permission in our society to do anything simply because we feel like it) – to witness injustice, to defend against disappearance, to reveal what was erased, etc.  Then the pendulum swung to the other end – I became convinced that I was writing to save my own life, to heal my own pain, to reconcile with the world of loss.  I’m sure my reasons will change again, but at the “completion” (in quote marks because no writing is ever finished) of my second poetry manuscript, I realized something profoundly liberating: that no reason can ever encompass the practice of writing.  What I thought were reasons were no more than the circumstances and conditions for my specific experience of the practice.  We don’t ask a flower why it flowers and even if there was an answer, I think it would be a circular one: it would flower to discover what kind of flower it was.  It is the outside gaze that demands a reckoning, the scientist/the god/the academy that demands the justification that this trait/this poem be part of a bigger plan, an evolution, an argument for our lives.  But I’d like to put out there that when it comes to writing, trauma is not the culprit or point of origin.  Trauma is an environment that requires our adaptation.

One more thought.  Notice that Walcott does not say “to sound like ourselves,” but, “to sound more like ourselves.”  Voice is such an integral thing to people who have experienced historic and systemic silencing, but self is not reducible to voice.  Nor is voice reducible to self: it is a social artifact, while it might be of me it will have to live out there and find resonance independent of me to have any lasting value.  A similar relationship pertains with language – neither can the self own language or be engulfed by it.  Or at least this is what I believe and find comfort in, that I am as much what I cannot bring to say, as I am what I articulate.  Somewhere between self, voice and language, is writing, like needle and thread, patterning leakages, sites of osmosis and blending, but also boundaries, limits to metamorphosis, what is inalienable to us and will not be breached.