I rode the bus earlier today. An older Nigerian woman, mid- to late- 40s, was standing in the middle. She was singing, not loudly, but audibly. I’m a big-city girl born and raised. I don’t stand next to people singing on buses. I manoeuvred past her, to the back, I could see her. As the bus went south, her singing got louder. It wasn’t very good, but hey. Do your thing.

Then she started moving to her music, grinding and swaying her hips. The older white women on bus played right up. Looks of disgust and distaste to reflect their opinion of the crazy African woman. Conspiratorially looking at each other, noses wrinkled in unison, backs straightened, chins raised. I’ve had too much race theory recently - ideas of civility, performance, fetishism through my head. I couldn’t even smile apologetically when they looked at me, expected me to, as the only other black woman on the bus. Couldn’t do it. I haven’t been able to play that game for years. Felt the relief in the bus when she disembarked. Watched the façade of propriety fall away.

And I was angry as I watched s(w)inging-bus-lady walk away, hips swaying still. Was fighting too much inside my own head. I’ve got my own sign with “crazy African woman” on it somewhere in my mental. I’ve rejected expectations, notions of performance, they were driving me crazy. Internally conflicted, because I saw the madness s(w)inging-bus-lady displayed. Real recognise real. And it made me angry. Not at the race ish, I’m too weary for that right now. I was angry because s(w)inging-bus-lady had something I didn’t.

I envied s(w)inging-bus-lady her madness. She gets to sing, carry music in her voice and body. I get to hide, surrounded by fear and anxiety, silent screams and fetal pose. I’m still recovering from the last (very recent) episode. I still get those dreams.

She gets to dance.

“So if you wake up one morning and it’s a particularly beautiful day, you’ll know we made it. Okay, I’m signing out.” Sunshine, 2007.

“i need someone who absorbs the sun.

i am the sun.

this feeling, it’s retroactive. it’s irrational but founded. there can’t be two sources of light occupying the same place at the same time. i learned that from lauryn hill, zealot.

i was going to say to him: now. me and you and this moment, only. let’s find an old man, dressed in white, with rheumy eyes and a swollen nose. an old man who smells sweet and eats raw onions. and let’s ask that old man to preside. we’ll have to ask him twice and spell my name out slowly.

i stopped myself. recognised the feeling as suicide, a snuffing of the fire. no red dragon, tommy.

water between us. i wish for telepathy, communication without capital.

are you reading me?

he offered a holiday. vocalised a wish. we had one, love, remember. it ended at dawn, when the sun rose and the crowds gathered. vulturing.

i didn’t realise that i repeated. i mean, i know i have patterns, i conducted my own rhythmanalysis years ago, in red lighting. i just hadn’t noticed this particular pattern. moth to light. bee to flower. me to you. reincarnation, of energy. no courage though, no follow-through. hard to see anything but failure now. on the bright side, repetitive disappointment as a determinant of success.

try, try, try (a little tenderness). i’m trying.

tracy said that it sounded like a whisper. in my mind, it’s a scream…”

it’s been a while since i’ve done any real creative writing. probably since around september, with the beginning of the major undertaking. i’ve been scribbling here and there, mainly to maintain sanity. but as the year comes to an end, i’ve been thinking more and more about what role my writing’s meant to play in my life.

(i have been writing academically - thousands and thousands of words. but it’s not the same).

a morning conversation with my temporary roomie sparked off a whole series of thoughts. beginning with young singers and emcees who have yet to settle into their voices, styles. looking at my writing throughout the years, and seeing how i’m now comfortable with my writing style, easy with the way i handle myself verbally. on paper/screen, that is. knowing that now, only just now, i’m ready to move this into a more public space.

at one point in his life, even my grandfather rejected the title of “poet.” nothing can explain what that means to me.

it should have clicked when i started moving my writing away from tradition. reached a place where i felt my foundation was solid enough for me to launch myself on it. so okay, i’ve tested that. and i’m happy with the results. now what?

a project that i have wanted to do for years is taking on an urgency i don’t understand. part of it has to do with my reason for doing it, which worries me, but i don’t want to deal with that now. or ever.

i don’t know what’s next. but i do know 2010 is going to be big. really big. i’m putting it out there right now: i’m stepping up. i want to see what i can give, what i can affect, what i can change. and i’m giving it my all.

Words matter (become matter).
© Saul Williams: The Dead Emcee Scrolls.

I.

There’s something that I want, have wanted for the last year or so. An intense, overwhelming, all-consuming desire, something I had never felt before and am now feeling in the core of my being. This need manifests in the physical, my subconscious reminds me of it in my dreams, and it’s a constant, growing void in my life. Disturbing, but action on it is now non-optional. Truth be told, I believed it would have come to bear by now. Or at least I would have been a lot closer than I am.

Words become matter. Isn’t that the whole point of prayer? The vocalization of desire, formatted into a request to a higher power. Words manifest. What words do I manifest? What words do I want to manifest? The secret behind The Secret.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to turn one of the most intense desires I have ever felt in my life into something that’s real. And also trying to prepare a portal back into the unreal just in case it doesn’t happen. I now know how to do that selectively, that was the whisperer’s gift to me. Thank you.

I’ve been voicing my desires. I didn’t start doing that though until the dreams started. The dreams increase and decrease in frequency and intensity; I had expected them to come to a head sometime soon, but no. I have to be patient (still working on that, but I’m getting there), and I have to not force anything, as is my wont. I just have to wait for these words to manifest.

II.

I get projected on(to) a lot. Names/titles get placed on me, start shaping how I’m viewed by different people. I often shrug, let them perceive me in the image they create. It’s their mental state that’s at stake, not mine. Maybe I’ll raise an eyebrow when I hear myself introduced. (Please note – this happens mainly in platonic and semi-formalised relationships.)

Sure, I’ll be a passive recipient of your fantasies. But only for as long as I can stand still. Don’t expect a heads-up when I get bored. I’m not your lover unless I engage in loving you. I’m not your manager unless I’m conducting your affairs. Dude, I’m not even your friend unless I’ve told you I’m there.

This is only meriting a post because ish is getting annoying. Other people not involved in the name-bestowing have been referring to me by given handles. I have to keep on correcting them. This places the name-giver in a bad situation, but next time, consult before you call me anything but my own name.

Sometimes there are words I won’t manifest.

III.

I’m not down to have my needs rejected before I’m allowed to voice them. The politics of exclusion manifesting in intimate spaces. If space is only selectively made for me, I need to take a long hard look at how I allow myself to be treated.  And right now, I’m too fragile to be mis-handled. I try to explain, but I’m left choking on the words stuck in my throat, too worried to speak them in case the response brings on another constrictive experience.

I’m trying to develop my criteria for successful relationships: where are my boundaries, what are my deal breakers, what do I expect, what do I reject? Heavy, intense, and more difficult because they’re unfixed. And then trying to move those ideas into the concrete: how do I want to be treated when I’m in a writing state? When, how and why do I become needy and how to avoid that? How do I expect my other to read me?

I need to know who I’m dealing with, and I like to know what tools I have at hand for dealing with them. Where my weaknesses are and how, once known by the other, they’re handled. Are they protected, attacked, manipulated?

Checklists are so pedantic, borderline neurotic. Let me distill mine: Is your word your bond?

***

Starfish silhouetted/I watch him
blend away in black skies.

(dec09)

Alongside a whole bunch of practical academic and career projects, I’ve been contemplating on the daily. Time taken for meditative walks, morning coffees, streetcar rides. Large, looming questions, thankfully non-oppressive. Amazed at my mind’s ability to navigate, function. Shame about my body’s though, that has conveniently caved and forced me to bedrest repetitively. I blame it on a culturally pathologised flaw in the design - if you ignore my heritage, “special needs” - but I know and you know it’s not fully true. My mental has always been mirrored in my physical: witness the chewed down nails, the limp, the return of the headaches, the rash on my wrists. That noticeable decline of physical strength. When I’m broke down, I’m frighteningly fragile. Eggshell.

I digress. Things are clicking, stuff is getting examined:

• I have a fear of not being viewed/accepted as the only one. My family and friends (affectionately, I assume) label me as a princess, an attention-seeker, high-maintenance. Professionally, this has been reflected into an impossibly-small niche, a refinement/advancement of my career into making me one of a handful with the disparate knowledge base that I have. Easily traceable, the roots of this need. Despite this, or maybe precisely because of this, I do not compete with others, and resent feeling placed in a competitive situation.
• Things I thought I had dealt with are rising to the surface. I’m still easily triggered over things I believed I had long unpacked and put away, but that’s not true. I had just shoved them into a closet, assuming that no one would ever try to open that door. Great. Now everything’s all over the corridor, waiting for me to do a better job this time around. I’m just going to sidestep for now, it’s a little easier.
• I deal too easily with absolutes. When I’m wronged, the hurt I feel in (over)reaction is so intense, my reflex is to shut down, amputate immediately. It’s a joke about Scorpios, the way they hold on to grudges. Misunderstood that, we’re more likely to feel even the slightest mis-step against us as an epic wrong; it’s simpler and self-preserving to refuse to engage with someone who has hurt us, kinder to Self than to work through the pain. And don’t trivialise this as another overreaction - what might be viewed by anyone else as a casual, simple mistake has such profound consequences for my psyche, understand that I can’t help that. My only known coping strategy involves novocaine for the soul. I’m now searching for other ways. And please don’t categorise me as emo, I’m finding that offensive these days.
• I’m incredibly confused about everything, flashback to my teenage years. At least then I wasn’t worried about consequences. Everything now seems so dire, so urgent. Caught up in the now, future so hazy it’s frustrating. Paralysing sometimes too. A person of extremes, my response comes out in performed certainty. If you haven’t figured this out by now, the more self-assured I appear, the less certain I am about anything in that moment. At least I know this about myself, and to protect, I don’t choose to reveal this to most. But I try and drop hints to the people close to me. Even more so than the tortoise on the cliff top of a mountainous island surrounded with shark-infested seas, I’m protective of my soft inside.

In spite of all this, I’m feeling positive, strangely in control. Possibly delusional, but I don’t care. There’s a new strength, a drive to achieve something within this. To find out what I’m talking about, use this:

.

first, the world grows bigger. you get dizzy, reverse vertigo. then, all of a sudden, you realise that you’re really shrinking. you know this because your skin shrinks faster than the rest of your body and everything is so tight you can barely breathe. you’re scared because you don’t know what’s going on, all you know is that your environment has suddenly hulked out on your ass.

you turn, and step face-first into a chair leg that seconds ago was smaller, punier. the panic takes over. you do the only thing you know how to do instinctively - your childhood prepared you for this - and you look for a hiding place. under a table, in a corner, beneath a blanket. squeeze your eyes shut so hard, your temples hurt.

pleasegodmakeitstoppleasegodmakeitstoppleasegodmakeitstop.

you wait for god for who knows how long, until your breath calms down, your heartbeat slows, and the pain from your nails digging into the palm of your hands exceeds the sound of your blood pounding in your ears. you wait a little longer. the world seems so still, but you’re not ready yet to open your eyes, lift the cover away from your head, emerge from your cubby. you slowly unclench, barely shifting position, expecting something to happen. but nothing does.

the rational returns home, all boisterous-like: it’s just a moment, it’s over now, c’mon, it coaxes. you wanna shake the rational part of you until it dies because the second the world turned nightmare, rationality left without so much as a by-your-leave. but you can’t because that’s the only way you survive out there. the fear and anger turns into desperate need and you cling to the rational with every last shred of dignity you have left. and you open your eyes, relief tinted with… is that disappointment?… manic hysteria at the unexpected normalcy.

incense smoke. chant meditate. give thanks.

gratitude for power. gratitude for ability. gratitude for friendship and support.

repeat these words, encased in bass.

repeat these words, until you fall into them.

repeat these words, make them true.

calligraphic letters become character. holding the brush that painted them. brushing phrases onto blankness, seen in the mind’s eye.

repeat these words.

pray for those who came before. pray for friends. pray for success, happiness, peace. pray for self and others.

innercity morning. expressway traffic humming into the chant. birdsong adding blips of high-pitched.

unexpected appreciated gift of sunlight and warmth, this autumn morning.

beautiful send-off for the end of an era. beautiful welcome for the beginning of a new phase.

great-full.

It’s like I’m walking through the streets, studiously avoiding cracks on pavements and picking up discarded emotions. It’s all random, seen? Can’t describe where these feelings are coming from, so rationalising that I’m a cuckoo, and they’re shiny.

Cue the significance of birds. Everywhere, dead and alive, suspended mid-flight, perched on fire escapes. Tottering between seeing them as omens of optimism v. harbingers of horror. Choose to believe in the beauty, thank God they’re not horrible birds, just cute little ones. Even in death, something about their adorability makes me happy they lived at one point.

I remember when I lived in places where you could see vultures circling in the distance, and you knew some poor thing was dying, somewhere out there in the lands that were bad. Lands that the sun made harsh and deadly during the day, and nighttime brought out venomous snakes and scorpions. Lands so fatally beautiful at dawn and sunset, alien and seductive under full moons. Where people went to go mad.

Moving away on into this concrete jungle. The greyness of cities makes me less human, less individual, less whole, in the exact opposite way those prairie skies humanised me with their esoteric godliness. Nothing I feel is new.

***

A childhood backdropped by conflict. Grateful for the safety and sheltering that privilege provides. Gunshots in the night heard in childhood, but spared the site of death. Only in the daytime, blood smears, burned out shells, bullethole walls. Harsh desert sun sterilises, cleans. Nothing to fear out there. Weapons normalised. Three different continents, three different conflicts. Spared the worst. The army’s always been around.

Standing guard against possible attacks on sunburned tourists. Skulking on street corners. Abseiling down buildings in alleyways. Cuffing people against brick walls. Speak of dehumanising - who’s got it worse, the perpetrator of the violence or the victim? I think I know which one I would rather be, where I’d rather feel those handcuffs.

But nothing I feel is new.

***

Romantic notions of home, family, life and love. She was never easy with me, never smiled and chatted with me the way she did with others. Didn’t understand why until it was too late, didn’t understand that I threatened. I wish I could console, say there’s nothing here for you to fear, you’re too beautiful, too good. I’m nothing next to you. But we both know that’s not true, that the slightest gesture from me would move powers greater than both of us to act. Maybe it’s best I never got to say anything.

Wasn’t the same way for my ancestors. They spoke (were spoken to), and the outcome each time was what she feared. I’m not the same as them, although their blood’s in me, I’m not the same as them. I’m a product of my acceptance and rebellion against that heritage, and this struggle’s altered my DNA, chimera-ed me into this unknown, previously-unseen hybrid.

Nope, nothing new felt here either.

The single biggest theme in my creative work is memory. I am obsessed with how memory preserves, re-creates, fabricates and fictionalises events. How memory is the most unreliable narrator of all, yet how we desperately cling to our memories for truth. We are so deceived about the factual, and yet we continue operating as if everything we remember is truth, with a capital T.

The more I work on pieces about memory, the less faith I have in myself. I doubt myself at such a fundamental level, I can’t even take what’s real as what’s true. No wonder my hold on reality is so flimsy. I’m a fabrication of my own hallucinated remembrances.

The implications of this are huge. I feel shadowy, faint outlined. I’m perplexed by everyone and their responses. I want to shake the world like a snowglobe and scream out nothing is as you remember! nothing is the way it was! We don’t even know how things were.

The romanticisation of memory is nostalgia. Blows my mind how yesteryear is so wonderful, warm. I grew up in London, and the last time I visited, I pilgrimmed to the chip shop at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road. Seeking the memory of over-salted vinegar-y potatoes in my mouth. In Khartoum, my eyes burn until I see the Nile. In Regina, it’s the driving of the one-ways just south of downtown. Thought all these actions were old habits, but they’re not. Just my way of cementing memory - see, the chips still taste incredible. The Blue and White Niles still soothe me. Ergo, my memories must be real. But they’re not. They are not.

There’s a lot of repetition in my writing - and my speech. By saying the same thing over and over, I’m not advertising a damaged short-term memory. I’m just cementing things, making sure they’re fixed more factually in my mental. I understand why people repeat stories, why old folks tell you the same thing over and over again. Repetition turns falsehoods into truths. We need to do this to make sure that we’re not delusional. But some of us don’t understand this. I think that’s the easier way to be.

I’m not the only one obsessed with memory. Anyone who creates anything - painters, writers, musicians - are controlled by memory, whether they consciously recognise this or not. What’s dangerous is when you start operating as if every memory you have is false. I see my intimates now as constructs, and I really need to stop that. Operating from the notion that if they’re constructs, there’s nothing to stop me projecting my own desires and needs on to them.

And that’s not a place anyone wants to be in, my needs are intense untempered.

The major undertaking’s been mad intense. Imposter syndrome all up in it. But it’s exciting, and every single moment I’m grateful for the privilege and blessings I’ve received. It’s made a lot of things clearer about my path, and what I’m meant to do with my life. Even with all the drainage, even with all the intensity, stress, anxiety, things are getting clearer.

Aside: Following Goals, Mathematik feat. Bahamadia on the stereo. iTunes ability to soundtrack my life is eerie.

Anyway, aside from the lack of sleep, intellectual overstimulation and the seepage into re-evaluating my own abilities, the other parts of my life are taking an interesting turn.

Creative work. What I’ve been learning is shaping my creative work outside of the major undertaking. A project that I’ve been working on for a while is getting crazy positive feedback, and the part of my brain that relentlessly obsesses is all over it. I’ve put it out there to the Universe, we’ll see what comes back. I can’t wait for these things to manifest, can’t wait for a sense of closure on the literally tens of half-started brilliant ideas. Execution is the hardest part of that war, and my weaponry’s strapped on, let’s do this. Also, synchronicity again surrounds this one particular project.

Personal life. My time’s been scarce, and I’ve had to ration it out. I withdrew for a little while, and then got the best advice ever: let your people know where your head’s at. I’ve always been an incredibly intense person, one that most people can only handle in small doses. So I learned at an early age to tone it down, filter for the sake of others. I’m unlearning that now, letting my emotions shine out like Scott Summers’ gaze. Unfortunate side effect is that friends have been reluctantly cut out, being unable to deal with the dust storm nature of my emotions. I can’t blame them, but I’m also not in a place where I have the energy to put their needs before mine. I’m being selfish, and I’m finding out that those who truly support me are circling me, protecting me from the outside, letting me do that. And not even telling me off. I have so much gratitude for my circle, as small as it’s getting.

Also, my 30th birthday’s coming up, so cue constant retrospeculative analysis. Morals, values, beliefs, and what I will and will not tolerate. At one point in my life, I honestly didn’t believe I would ever make it this far. But I did, and because I hadn’t planned for it, I’m all like, so… what now? Reviewing my history, reading the narrative and making editorial comments for the next ten years. Also, I’m patiently waiting for the end of Saturn doing whatever the hell it needs to do so I can get on with the rest of my life. We’ve been performing a ritualistic dance, but thank God my missteps haven’t been dramatic, and I haven’t gone stumbling. Still can’t trust that I’ll be caught before I smash my face. Not that it matters, I’ll heal.

The immediate focus is learning how to balance. I hadn’t been going to the gym for a couple of months, and now that the weather’s colder, I can’t get my physical fix outside, so it’s back to the cardio machines. Problem is, time. In learning to manage my time better, I’m eliminating anything extraneous that takes too much of my energy. Simply put, if it’s too much work for me right now (aside from the major undertaking and creative projects), it’s going to have to go, no hard feelings.

On an Andre Williams tip.