pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WILLFUL ARTICULATION Last night was one of those nights when I put up roadblocks—just to thwart myself, I reckon. Don't know if this is some dysfunctional form of what I must believe is self-protection, if it's residual stuttering crap, introversion, or what, but I do know that it's frustrating. I am a fairly articulate writer, but this doesn't mean I'm always verbally articulate. Sometimes someone asks me a simple question and, instead of replying, I just freeze like the reformed stutterer I am and feel like a deer caught in someone's headlights, and the only way I can manage to speak at all is to act as if I'm me performing as myself (if that makes any sense at all). I checked out to the student show of Buzzcut's art therapist friend last night, for example. This kind-eyed, beautiful woman—was that the problem?—asked me what kind of art I make. A simple question, really. But I froze and felt trapped and stood there silent for too long before finally managing to mumble something along the lines of "I draw a lot and like to build things out of clay, but have mostly been attaching weird things to canvas lately." Here's the thing: I feel so much passion for what I create and much of it is truly interesting stuff, so what is UP with this god damn social freezing? Been pondering this question, and wonder if my level of discomfort centered around the fact that this art therapist stranger knows intimate details about me (but I don't know what these details are), if my emotional discomfort with how things happened between Buzzcut and me—and how it looks too, maybe—made me feel that awkward. That's certainly a vulnerable area for me right now, and introducing myself as Buzzcut's friend Bird did feel loaded. But the plot thickens! Fiddlergrrl and I caught a late dinner after the art crawl and she asked casually what my novel is about. Then I, casually, froze. Momentarily. And just couldn't think of how to answer that question. It's about so many things, really. Personal things. It's a fictionalized autobiography. I grew up in the midst of some extreme circumstances, so there's a lot about my childhood that makes for an interesting read. My story spans several generations. It's about towns that were destroyed and towns that were created by our government to replace those towns that they destroyed. Buried things are a central theme: radioactive fuel rods that the Department of Energy buries in cardboard boxes near my childhood home parallel the emotions and rage that my family buries. Then there's the main character's obsession with digging for and identifying buried ruins, which parallels her attempt to understand the buried dangers in her home and town. It's about the Department of Energy rearranging a landscape and stamping RESTRICTED • US GOVERNMENT over huge portions of the South Carolina countryside and announcing DO NOT ENTER to people whose families were part of that landscape for —natives who thought of that land as theirs and didn't recognize how much the roots of a particular cypress tree along a particular bend in a particular creek where their grandparents took them fishing and where they took their children fishing mattered until they lost those sacred places. It's about building bombs in people's communities on restricted land. It's a book set in a place where families once lived and rode bicycles and fucked and cried and spanked their kids with switches and grew roses. It's about my particular parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, about my hard-headed Cherokee ancestors who refused to go to Oklahoma when the government marched a whole class of people along a Trail of Tears—about my people who insisted that no one can make us leave our place and then by Gawd they stayed there. It's about growing up southern and female and Southern Baptist in a violent and racist and beautiful place. About Baptist camp. About me as a little runaway girl trying to find something to eat. And mostly, it's written documentation of my process of deciding to actively remember things that I kept buried for far too long, and then doing that through writing and rewriting and exploring what I think I remember for accuracy and facing the nightmares that I need to face in order to articulate what it feels like to be held off the ground by my neck and have my head beaten through a wall until I see my own blood splash on my father's face and feel my own lungs scream from the need to breath and then losing consciousness believing that I was dying—about my attempts to capture the terror of thinking that I would die and nothing I could do could stop it. It's about the rabbit screams that I keep inside me, about willful articulation. And it is ultimately about loss. But how the hell do I capture all that in a simple, concise, polite description doled out while we wait on our appetizer? The things I create are so personal, so tied to my emotional explorations, into what's going on inside me at an unconscious level until the creative process brings these things to light, and talking about intimate terrains politely with someone I don't know well just makes me feel exposed at a time when I already feel like someone who is walking around publicly keening. I'm going to have to learn how to step back from that keening and speak in my university voice (which you'd think I would have figured out by now, given the number of poetry readings I've given)—perform as me on demand as I finally did last night (and as I do when I teach or give a reading or meet strangers at social events). Learn how to toss out the expected phrases about my work: "I use blues juxtaposed against reds and yellows to suggest A..." or "through this composition, I am able to comment on our cultural propensity to do B..." and other such bullshit. Fiddlergrrl also asked me what kind of poetry I write—the most intimate and personal of any creation, in my humble opinion—and I won't even go into how much I could not answer that question.
Today I hate myself. 1:47 p.m. - 2005-03-20 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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