End of the year, and I’m taking stock. 2009’s been one helluva ride, filled with the most amazing events and people. Both positive and negative. It’s mostly here, so I’m not going to re-cap, just a quick sketch-up of what’s been featuring most prominently in my mental:

I both underestimate my capabilities and at the same time, overestimate my capacities for what I am able to handle. The last three months have been the most mentally challenging of my life, hands-down-no-question-about-it. I was so completely sideswiped with a brutal reality check: I can no longer live my life the way that I have been. Things need to change.

I don’t remember the last time that my life had any routine or structure. There was some semblance when I worked in an office, but I had been brought in as a renegade, someone to bring in fresh thoughts and ideas, and so many allowances were made for me. The first structure to go was hours of work: as long as I put in at least the required amount of hours (which I often exceeded), and as long as all my deadlines were met to a predetermined level of satisfaction (which they were), I was free to start and finish my day when I chose. So, I really haven’t ever as an adult had a fixed, dependable schedule. I eat when I’m hungry, sleep when I’m tired, and book my appointments and meetings around those two needs. This now has to change, and trying to adapt into a routine of any kind is going to be challenging, to say the least. But it has to happen – I need to find a more efficient way of managing my time. And it’s not even about getting more done, it’s about having more free time to engage in leisure activities, visit with friends, go to galleries, shows, concerts, etc.

This leads into the second thing that’s been on my mind; my community is incredibly important to me, but I’ve sort of been MIA on that front. I haven’t had the time or energy, being completely overtaken by the undertaking (and Darkness, more on that in a bit). I need to be more present and more active in my community. A special thank you goes to those who kept on checking up on me when I was AWOL, the ones who brought food over and made sure I got the time I needed, the ones who never got mad when it took me too long to call them back, and especially to the ones who really listened to me. I need no one but you. I want no one but you. And in return, I need to step up to my community.

I’ve been living with Darkness for as long as I can remember. I didn’t know what was going on before, but for the last couple of years, I have known. And apart from the power that knowing has given me, I haven’t done much to reduce my experiences. Naming something is incredible, but not acting on that knowledge means that it’s useless. I go through cycles – things get progressively darker, and I’m so oblivious that I don’t notice what’s going on until I start breaking things, cowering and hiding until I scream the Darkness away and things get lighter. I can’t go on like this – it’s damaging to me personally, and hurtful to those closest to me who end up dealing with it too. So things have to change on this front too. I’ve spoken with professionals about my options, and I know what’s available to me. It’s just a matter of setting things up so I am able to help myself into a better, brighter place.

Friendship has changed, shifted. This year, thanks to one disappointment after the other, I’ve learned that I expect too much from people. And I give too much to people. I got jaded for a while, stopped expecting, but that’s not fair to the people who work in relationships. I’m changing how I define and view friendship, I used to be ride-or-die, now I only am if I know I’m getting the same in response. I’ve also shifted how I perceive people, away from their words and toward their actions. I know whose got my back out there, and I also know who I want to have my back. It messed me up for a minute, the transformations in a couple of relationships that I had thought were solid, and I’m now on a different track. When I was younger, an older friend told me that she categorized her relationships based on what the other person was able to give. At the time, I thought she was being callous and opportunistic; now I finally see the truth in what she was saying. I’m learning that maybe people aren’t able to deliver what I expect from them, and that my disappointment becomes unfair to them. I’m also learning I can’t expect from others what they expect from me, and I don’t like that. I’m having a hard time dealing with the fact that I’m expected to adhere to a moral code only inasmuch as it doesn’t affect others. And I’m also learning that I have a really hard time dealing with other people’s selfishness. Which ultimately means I need to deal with my own selfishness. Yeah, like I really needed more harsh lessons to learn. This year’s been all about personal growth.

I believe that I’m nearing the end of a major transformation. I now have to focus my energy on completing my discovery of who I want to be, how I want to be seen, and what – internally and externally – would make me happy. I know that I’m nearing a place where this knowledge is both crucial to my survival and essential for the next phase of my life.

When looking at this past year overall, it’s been great, but challenging. The few positive things that have happened have been momentous in their significance, and have been and will continue to outweigh the hard times of this past year.

I’m grateful for 2009 and I’m looking forward to 2010 being great-full.

***

There’s more I need to write, several things that have been so crucial to this year, but haven’t been included above. These include: my own personal ideas of nationality, citizenship, homesickness; family, both blood and acquired, current and future; partnership and support; heritage and legacy; and my own work as a writer. Soon come.

i went through the emails, messages, cards. i’m on a nostalgia tip, the ghost of _____ past running through my head. except time’s all messed-up, so i’m dealing with pastpresentfuture. all at once. it’s been a heavy emotional journey, documented online breadcrumb trails on blogs and twitter feeds, status updates. we’ve been so public and confessional.

i can’t count the amount of phonecalls i’ve had in response to posts i’ve made. check-ups resulting from my broadcast emotions. and those of others. i look for the patterns in correspondence, and i can see them. there are some pretty high crests before those lowlowlow troughs.

i’m still shaky, unsure, wishful so it’s probably not the greatest idea for me to do this right now. not at this time of the night, which is my witching hour. retrospective word of the year is: bombardment. from everywhere.

like that line nikki drops, on her first date with vik. like friday afternoons under a baobab tree. like bedtime with my grandmother. dry, rough hands. the scent that triggers dream memories, brown and gold. 81+18, son. sign of god’s beauty. i didn’t know. speaking of hands, i want to force yours. but instead of reaching, i instinctively reach for patience. golden war. timestepping van Winkle. funny, you never disappointed me. shifted my gaze downwards, on a level. glitter dust falling all around me. i see you. in your own weird, unreliable way, you’re now a constant, now something steady i can refer to. no pain in the stranger. i’m this close (pinched fingers) to claiming my wish. learning a new vocabulary, a new way of being. co-existing, giving up on molding, learning to become less inflexible. learning to stop with the futility, learning to stet.

***

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico “Run Run Run” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

Spoiler alert.

I watched Avatar last night. I was curious about the movie for its technical achievement and the sci-fi dealing with imperialism story theme, but 15 minutes through the movie though, the main question in my mind was: puke now or puke later?

The film is discomforting and dated in its colonial, imperialist politics. Basically, paralysed former Marine ends up controlling his deceased identical twin brother’s Avatar (body made from combined human-alien DNA, remote-controlled using the human’s brain) on an alien planet called Pandora. There, he ends up “going native,” hooking up with the chief’s daughter, selling out the locals, and then redeeming (not in my eyes) himself by stopping the Earthmen from destroying the planet for resources. He then completes the going-native cliche by submitting to the Mother-Earth-Divine-Goddess deity of the locals to permanently become one of them. Uh, yeah.

Nothing we haven’t seen before, right? It’s Pocahontas, but with blue aliens. Add a bunch of cliched sci-fi tropes, sprinkle in a Nature-über-alles moral, hit up the Westerns for bad-guy dialogue ideas, and there you have it. Except for the racial politics: the local Pandorans, called the Na’vi, are of course, black.

Some of them speak English with really bad African accents (is it Nigerian? Ghanaian? Moroccan?), wear regalia lifted piece-by-piece from turn-of-the-century – not this century, the last one – photographs of the Masai (down to the hairstyles and beaded chokers), have a pattern of brightly-coloured dots on their skins a la tribal scarification, and their warpaint looks suspiciously like the manhood rituals of some South African tribes. The Na’vi are referred to as savage and primitive (by the military and corporate characters), fetishised for their relationship to Nature (by the female lead scientist, a role Sigourney Weaver was wasted in) or idolised by the male lead, Jake Scully (all one word to the Na’vi).

There are tribal prayer scenes that bring to mind the drumming circles at Trinity-Bellwood Park on a Tuesday night. Scantily clad natives contrasted by the civilised white scientist who maintains her decency, wearing t-shirts and hiking boots as an avatar. Trilling, snarling in anger, and exposure of fangs, animalistic displays of emotions by the Na’vi. There are several tests of belonging, which JakeScully aces, until he becomes an outcast whereby he gets back into the good books by claiming a legend. JakeScully then experiences hero-worship from all the Na’vi, including his former arch-nemesis.

To me, the sketchiness of the film’s politics can be summarised in one line, screamed at JakeScully by the cowboy/general during their final confrontation:

“How does it feel to betray your race?”

Dude, these are aliens, which makes the correct word here “species.” Then again, the actors playing the lead aliens are all black (save one, who’s Cherokee), so I guess it might be an accurate statement. We have the wise and benevolent chief, his wife, the spiritual woman (who dismisses what she does as being voodoo or witch doctoring, when all her performances are white interpretations of both), the daughter – alien hotness promised to the leading warrior who she ditches to take a chance on JakeScully being alpha male. Because this movie plays up to colonial fantasies, we know that JakeScully is the alpha male, and the lead warrior is nothing but the noble savage provided for contrast.

I had (mistakenly) thought we had advanced past all the imperialist colonial fantasies, but judging from the response to Avatar and Cameron’s interview quotes, we are not. Space, the final frontier, I guess. Colonialism apparently left no lessons behind for those in power, only those oppressed.

Worth noting: subplots commenting on (dis)ability; performances of the male; the planet as mother; corporate greed chaperoned by military might.

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.