No. 26 - More Like Myself

I posted No. 24 & No. 25 to Facebook & IG, so please feel free to check those out there. Here goes No. 26, on dare I say, the 26th of October. Let’s go.

Also, thank you, for the engagement. It means alot.

I'm going to try to freehand some of my notes on a panel discussion on black women in the fiction of James Baldwin, a panel presented by the Center for Fiction with writers Honorée Jeffers, Kim Coleman, Regina Porter, Shayla Lawz, and Francesca Monplaisir. 

There were a couple of things that I appreciated about this presentation. Firstly, they kind of jumped right in. Of course, the director, I believe, of the Center for Fiction spoke. And then they didn't do pomp and circumstance. They just got right into reading excerpts of Baldwin's text, featuring black women, Black female characters. And then after, I would say, probably about twenty-five minutes of the separate panelists reading, the writers then took questions from the moderator, Francesca Monplaisir.

So, yeah, this was last month, late September. I just really like that they jumped right in. Monplaisir had such really probing, but also, just good questions. And so, of course, each of the writers, had a lot to say. I'm not going to do a whole outtake. But there were things that stayed with me.

So one, Kim Coleman speaks on a character involved in a novel titled Just Above My Head by Baldwin. The character's name is Julia. And so, what Coleman really appreciated about Julia was her dynamism, her ability, her narrative, her story, her way of transforming herself multiple times. And I latch onto that because I sometimes feel that I put myself some where and I can't seem to get out of that where. And so, I appreciate characters and, just people, who I see transforming, you know, and I think it's also so hard to do when you're in the comfort of your family, you know, in the comfort of your friends and the comfort even of colleagues, you know, it's hard to kind of, you know, to step out or step into yourself and not rock the boat. 

I also  was listening to a writer quoting Thelonious Monk as saying “a genius is someone who is most like [themselves]. And that is something I think of at the same time as I consider this kind of transforming oneself multiple times. Maybe perhaps with each transformation, you're getting closer and closer to the self that is most like yourself. But, yeah, you know, when are you most like yourself? When am I most like myself? Why am I not like myself? What are these other selves that are layered above/upon myself?

So, not to go completely on a tangent, but I still want to hold on to this idea that not only can we shift, we can shape-shift and be comfortable with that, but we can also perhaps shape-shift into the shape that is who we are and feel comfortable there and to feel ourselves there and to be there. You know, for me, I know it's also kind of replacing the ego with perhaps the Buddhist way of saying that would be replacing ego with an idea of emptiness, of not-self, of not getting so connected to these versions, these images, even if it’s just in my mind, of who I am, who people perceive me to be, and to just, you know, rock outside of all these extrapolations of who people think I am.

So then later on in the same discussion, Honorée speaks. Honorée Jeffers speaks. And actually, I think I'm going to paraphrase, what Jeffers speaks on. So there's a clip, I think that in the panel, I'm pretty sure I'm remembering correctly here, a clip is played of a conversation between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin, and you notice the tension. Giovanni says something along the lines of "I don't like white people and I'm afraid of black men." So it's a conversation about these relationships between black men, black women. And Jeffers goes on to share that these are two queer people who are not really discussing their queerness, their gayness, their lesbianness. They're not discussing that, and instead they’re are kind of discussing a rather cisgender type of connections and relationships between people.

I think, later, the question Jeffers was responding to  is something along the lines of how have black women writers either connected to Baldwin's work. Jeffers shares that many black writers, and I'm thinking this is of the time period to the 60s, 70s, writers like Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor. She says that writers, many black writers, assume they are writing archetypes of black people. And so the characters represent, supposedly, blackness, black masculinity, black femininity, et cetera, et cetera. And this is something I think Jeffers was saying has continued into this time period that we're here now. And the caveat I think she gives for the writers, at least at the time in the 60s and 70s, is that they were attempting to change conversations nationally through their books. She, however, calls out that many black writers are doing this, except for Toni Morrison. She shares that Morrison did not, like many writers like Walker, for example, did not identify as a feminist, not a womanist. 

And so Jeffers goes on to share that there are all of these kinds of conversations that are happening that are really putting a lot of pressure on the art. And, she personally, as being the daughter of artists coming out of the Black arts movement, that these were conversations that were happening in her home. That [Angela] Davis, Walker, in many ways, are grappling with these same questions as Baldwin. And, specifically, that he is grappling with this idea of manhood. I'm paraphrasing Honorée Jeffers here. 

And I appreciated, I appreciated this because this particular understanding of the grappling that was happening and maybe even is still happening magnified for me this idea that we, as blackwomen, should all be strong, that we should all put community first, so on. And I think that that stands out to me because I can remember my mother letting me know about a writer, a research [Dr. Leith Mullings] who wrote on the Sojourner Truth syndrome. But again, this idea that, you know, I can do it all myself. I can. I'm a strong black woman. I can, you know, carry mountains with one hand. And then adjacently, this idea that we all put community first.

And that is an idea that is, I find it's,  comes at me because I profess, you know, without shame, you know, to put community first or to certainly love the space of gathering, of connecting with people I care about, people I love both on a more personal, individual level and then, I guess, in some ways, in a larger level. But this idea that is ours as a people, as black women, that our main concern, our main necessity, our main obsession for community to be your main thing. I think there is some faultiness there. Like, I think we can be people. We can be in the world. We can be. We can sort of stand on our own, which is not to say to stand alone, but we can also stand on our own in our own right, with our own considerations, thoughts that may not necessarily be like unity, you know, community.

So, even as writers, internally may be showing up in a way that is not showing up on their page or even, maybe not showing up in a public way, but still making these sort of philosophical statements in the writing.

And so it does make me think about the complexity of who we are and the complications of who we are and whether or not that truly shows up in our public selves or in our inner writing, our more private selves. What are you, what am I identifying as and how does your identity, my identity perhaps dictate what you're showing up as?

So I know I have to kind of probably flesh that out a little bit more, but yeah, that’s all for now.