a black girl

Courage

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Its not that I have been deliberately not publishing here. I think I took a journey only to return here. Funny thing about journals is that you can come back to them and they are always the way you left them--even if you think you left them differently. Really brings you into the reality that your own memory is failing. Anyway. I'm back here. At least for this moment ruminating on my multiple selves.

I talked to a fabulous sister girl friend who is embarking on some amazing travels-- the gypsy that she is. She is truly inspiring. My mind cannot flip its images fast enough to truly grasp a live moving image of how fascinating it is to be a gypsy. I think most of all because it takes a certain amount of courage that I have yet to attain.

I'm thinking a lot about courage these days because so many things are pushing me to be braver. My poetry is truly pushing me to push beyond the historical subjects I write about, beyond my own ego, to actually grapple with all of the things that haunt me. That's the thing about Avery Gordon's Ghostly Matters, is that so much of it is feeding the ego. It is quite easy to go about yacking about the things that concern you, the things your mind continually skips on-- moments in history, events in a life, a phrase, a soundbyte, a color, a smell. But the courage it takes to dive into these things, to do more than repeat them and dance with the faceless ghost of why. Why do you return? Why don't you move on? What would it mean to get past this? No longer remember? Who would you be? So much more frightening than simply repeating the memory, remembering the memory, harping on it, making a manuscript out of it. Much more frightening than picturing yourself without it. Who would you be without your memory?

Letting it go takes courage. Accepting it as a single moment in a longer trajectory of equally important albeit less exciting, traumatic, exhilarating moments takes even more courage because it forces me to see that I have so many more hours to make up so many more things in my life. This is the thing about time and memory-- that remembering takes time and it can be quite the tool of procrastination that helps me stay in fear.

And so here is a moment in my life asking for an extreme shift. I sit on the phone and try to imagine boarding up my cat in Louisiana with my mother, packing my bags and knowing what to pack, living in another country, and letting my art hold me I realize how much work in courage I need. But no. Its not even that. Its about writing a letter. One letter that means I am a strong person. That I control my destiny. If it were about leaving the country and making a dramatic shift in my footing alone the decision would be much easier. It is this first step. In allowing my decisions to be mine. For being my own representative. For standing up for myself. Being confident in my rightness.

Yes children, the word for today is courage.

Labels: dreams, life, memory