When my idealism knew no bounds

Reading through my old journals, starting at the beginning. I recognize this person, and yet I don't. In some ways I am less naive, and rereading my internal monologue is embarrassing. But in other ways, I am still the same idealistic person I was twelve years ago. Jaded enough to know I should be embarrassed by it, but still idealistic enough to stand by those words.

I am thinking about rewriting my memoir. Totally rewriting it. Starting over from the beginning, with the truly emotional story I never meant to tell. I'm a little scared, a little overwhelmed, not confident enough to broadcast my ambition anywhere but this neglected space.

The thing that's weird, rereading my Peace Corps journal, is the use of second person. I've since come to believe that authors often slip unconsciously into second person when they want to distance themselves from what they're writing. I think that's what I was doing here. Trying to step away from it all, trying to understand it from the outside.

Journal entry
June 14, 2001
Day #2 in Burkina Faso

You have spent twenty-four hours in transit: bus from Philadelphia to NYC, flight to Paris, transfer planes, stop in Bamako (Mali), resume flight to Ouagadougou. A storm is beginning outside; the plane bumps through marshmallow clouds, overlooking, far below, tiny dirt streets and clusters of brown houses. Brown streets. And scattered everywhere, clusters of brilliant green brush, like handfuls of living confetti welcome. You hit another bump in the air. Your stomach churns. Two rows up, a young woman throws up across the seat back in front of her. This is your arrival.

When the plane finally comes to a stop, you disembark on a tall set of stairs that has been rolled over to the plane. You climb down them, the way you seen the President do on TV after arriving in countless cities. Below you ten or fifteen of your fellow Peace Corps trainees are paused, waiting for the others before heading to the airport building. Some are turned to look up at you, grinning. "We're in Africa!" you shout down, giddy, in disbelief. You throw your hands up in the air like you have won some kind of a victory. It feels like you have. People around you cheer.

* * *
On the plane from New York to Paris, they made a special announcement as the plane touched down: "We'd like to extend our best wishes to the group of Peace Corps volunteers on board today." Someone in your group lets out a cheer, and soon all thirty-eight of you are screaming and clapping. As the noise dies down, you realize the flight crew is still talking on the intercom, saying something about humanitarianism and importance. You realize that once again, someone is making a judgment about you because of this group you have chosen to join. You have seen the eyes of many strangers who heard the words "Peace Corps" and decided you were Good. Like the woman at the travel supply store where you bought your backpack, the woman who stopped, stared at you, and said, "Thank you." In response to your confused and startled silence, she added, "What you're doing is so important. The rest of us Americans really should be thanking you. So thank you." You have no response but flattered silence. Perhaps, as another trainee said to her boyfriend, you should have responded, "Honey, I'm not as good as you think I am." But you didn't. Because deep inside, then, as now, as the cheers subside on the plane, there is a certain euphoria taking hold inside of you. A belief, a hope, that here is your chance to take the whole you - the imperfections and flaws along with the ideals and strengths - and put it to use in something bigger than you've ever known how to dream. But you do dream, and, for this moment, you let yourself believe that you can do something to earn the respect in those strangers' eyes and voices. Because you want to do something humanitarian and important. And you do believe you can make a difference.

Manifesto of my love for teenage writers

I just finished teaching a two-week novel writing class at the Loft Literary Center. It was a class for teenagers. Teenagers who chose to spend part of their summer breaks waking up early in the morning to take a writing class. Did I mention that class was on writing NOVELS?

I don't know about you, but I was not motivated enough to take on a novel when I was 13 years old. I don't think the idea even occurred to me. This makes me admire my students, and love them, and admire their parents, too. It also makes me think about the power of the Internet to connect and inspire teenagers with artistic passions, and it makes me wonder how my own writing life would have been different if things like wattpad and figment and NaNoWriMo had existed in 1995.

But enough speculation. What I can tell you for certain is that I've been teaching teen writing classes at the Loft for a few years now, and I'm continually blown away by how ambitious my students are and how smart the work they produce is. No, it may not be as technically sophisticated as what I'm used to seeing in grad school, but many of these teenagers have something that, at their age, is even more important than polish (because the polish will come): they've got ambition and vision and - drumroll - something to say. They're imagining future worlds, fantasy lands, and everyday characters, all in the midst of dramatic situations that reflect moral and ethical questions about the world we live in. I don't think these students are necessarily planning it that way. They're telling good stories, and those stories are meaningful because the writers are thinking about meaningful things.

That's the thing with teenagers. People underestimate them. I have some friends who've said, "There are teenagers writing novels? What do they possibly have to say?" My answer is: a lot. I don't want to divulge the unique and interesting plots my students shared with me over the last two weeks, but let me say that nearly every day, I've come home from class and said to my husband or close friends, "Can you believe my student is writing about this? It's amazing." And they've shared my amazement. My students are imagining hugely complex worlds, taking on ethical and moral issues, and breaking stereotypes. They're wrestling with big questions.

They're hilarious, too. And awkward. And gorgeous, without realizing yet how gorgeous they are. They're nerds and jocks and cool kids and they're somewhere in between, somewhere without an easy label, but for the last two weeks I didn't see a single eye-roll or impatient glare. They were just a group of kids interested in writing and in supporting each other. I'd come in ten minutes before class, and they'd be playing hangman on the board, eager to outwit each other with words like "rhythm" and "xylophone" and "antidisestablishmentarianism."

On the last day of class today, I wanted to beg all my students to friend me on facebook so I can stalk them for the next five or ten years and discover all the cool things they're going to write one day. But alas, life is hard for us creepy old adults. So instead, after the class reading, I just stood back as one girl gathered the others up for a picture, watching as they crowded close, and I smiled at the little community I and the Loft and a dozen amazing teenagers managed to bring together.

Writing the Other

Writers are often told, “Write what you know.” But if I wrote only what I knew, I’d be stuck writing about white, middle-class, heterosexual, North American women who grew up in the D.C. suburbs in the 1980s and ’90s.

I much prefer Yusef Komunyakaa’s advice, “Write what you are willing to discover.”

This is how I try to live my life, too. I wanted to discover the world, so after college I joined the Peace Corps and spent two and a half years in Burkina Faso, in West Africa. And over the last eight years since I returned, I’ve done a lot of writing set there. In a way, I know Burkina Faso. But ultimately, I’m still an outsider. When I write about Burkinabè, I’m writing about “the other.”

It is a tricky thing, being a privileged white Westerner and writing about people who have been colonized and oppressed by the dominant white, Western culture I come from. How can I make sure that I don’t repeat the mistakes of writers and travelers who’ve come before me, people who have marginalized “the other” by, in turn, both romanticizing and condemning them? Sometimes, I feel that by writing anything set in Burkina Faso – whether memoir or fiction – I’m willingly walking out in front of a firing squad. It has already been suggested to me – both directly in writing workshops, passive-aggressively during a Q+A with another writer, and in public and private comments from artist grant review panels – that as a white American I should not be writing about Burkina Faso or setting fiction there. That living in another country for only two years doesn’t qualify me to write about it. That if my fictional characters exhibit prejudice or cultural insensitivity, I as a writer need cross-cultural training and am not a worthy recipient of grant funds.

This criticism has frustrated me, angered me, and – in a healthy way – made me nervous. Living for two years in Burkina Faso didn’t make me an expert on the country, but I don’t believe that means I shouldn’t write about it. After all, I’ve lived in the United States for 31 years. Am I an expert on the U.S.? Of course not. The U.S. isn’t one monolithic place. Neither is Burkina. If we only allow ourselves to write about that which we're experts on, we'll never write anything at all. I think that as writers our calling, more than anything, is to write about what we care about. And what I care the most about, right now, are the things I learned about the world as a result of my experiences in Burkina Faso. That’s what I’m drawn to writing about, in both my fiction and nonfiction. So I’m going to write about it. The thing is, I’m terribly afraid of getting it wrong.

I shared my fears with writer Kirstin Cronn-Mills, a fantastic young-adult writer who writes frequently about characters markedly different from herself. And she recommended to me this short guide, Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward. This is a fantastic book that helps writers recognize the way they may be “unmarked” in their own societies and also become more confident and effective at writing about “the other.”

A lot of the book, for me, was a review. I’ve learned a lot about race, privilege, and “otherness” over the last 15 years by majoring in anthropology, living as a racial and cultural minority in Burkina Faso, working at a nonprofit whose mission was to assist poor men of color, attending numerous conference sessions on writing about “the other,” and participating in the Minneapolis YWCA’s “It’s Time to Talk” training sessions on race. However, I know this list doesn’t make me an expert. The more I get involved with learning about people who are different from me, the more I realize how much more there is to learn. 

The beauty of Shawl’s and Ward’s book is that it manages to speak to both someone who has never recognized the privilege of the dominant paradigm and someone who, like me, has done a lot of thinking about it. The book doesn’t talk down to the reader. Shawl and Ward aren’t interested in blaming members of the dominant paradigm for their privilege or making anyone feel guilty. What they’re interested in doing is helping writers understand different categories of “other” and give practical suggestions to help writers create believable characters that represent the full diversity of people in our society. They highlight the differences that mainstream U.S. culture deems most important: race, sexual orientation, age, ability, religion, and gender. However, they don't limit the conversation to only these characteristics. They're interested primarily in any characteristic that grants one group of people power and privilege, and naturally different people will view that list of characteristics differently. (Not least because Shawl and Ward open up their discussion to writers of science fiction and fantasy, where the categories may be dramatically different.)

Furthermore, Shawl and Ward point out that there is an “unmarked state” in literature, which refers to the assumptions that will generally be made about characters unless a reader is told otherwise. The authors, in teaching workshops about this topic, have found that generally their students will describe the “unmarked state” as “white, male, heterosexual, single, young, and physically able.” For better or for worse, if your characters deviate from this unmarked state, you have to tell the reader. I’ve heard black writers talk about this at writers’ conferences. One black writer, who writes primarily black characters, talked about how cumbersome it is to always find excuses for her narrators to look at themselves in the mirror and comment on their skin color. Writers of gay and lesbian characters struggle with the same thing.

I think perhaps the best thing I got from this guide was simply the encouragement to keep writing about The Other. Fear of failure is not a reason to stop trying. So, despite the occasional criticism lobbed my way, I'm going to keep writing about Burkina Faso, keep scrutinizing my writing for evidence of cultural imperialism and subconscious prejudice, keep trusting my readers and friends to point out my mistakes, and try to write and read in the spirit of Shawl and Ward, who assume that writers who get it wrong are not bigots, but simply ignorant. And ignorance is an educable state.

As Nisi Shawl writes in the short essay “Beautiful Strangers,” included in the book, “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes…Do your best, and you’ll avoid the biggest mistake of all: exclusion.”

Happy Peace Corps Week!

Here I am, in early September 2001, just after being sworn in as a Peace Corps volunteer, on the cusp of moving to my village. Just as is true with the best parts of life, I had no idea what was in store for me.

stunned by the night's consolation of stars

For a number of years, during college and after, this was my favorite poem:

Keeping Still

by Margaret Gibson

Because I saw

my mother, tense or careless, snap the string of her necklace,

a spill of beads shooting round on the floor,

I thought stars were so –

beads that could therefore be gathered, in one place cupped,

the sky held in a single crystal.

What is as patient, as still

as that thought? I am listening to the traffic into Boston,

how it swells and falls, in the rain a sea rushing

past the dark house.

I have followed as far as I can, leaning out of my skin, past the

red shift of car lights, through the tidal dark clouds to a misting of stars,

reaching, wanting more.

Even the galaxies, restless, are rolling farther, each from each,

on the face of eternity moving, a sweep of bright cells

rinsed daily away.

My heart is not quiet. I want the faith that moves mountains.

I want the bright force that holds them still.

How can anyone stunned by the night’s consolation of stars

dare say, I have not seen what I want –

and yet, I say it.

* * * * * 

It was that final stanza that once spoke to me so strongly. And then one day, I reread the poem to discover that it didn't. 

I think that's probably a good thing.

Nevertheless, I still find the poem quite beautiful. And I'm going to use it in class next week to talk about alliteration, consonance, and line breaks. Perhaps I can help another 19-year-old find some solace in knowing she's not the only seeker out there.

Tightening my language

Searching for my wordle words is helping me understand what it means to line-edit for the purpose of tightening. Here are a few examples of before and after, inspired by attempting to reduce my use of the word "one."

I'd never been one to flippantly enter relationships
I'd never flippantly entered relationships

Salif went to one of those doors and opened it.
Salif opened one of the doors. [Okay, I didn't eliminate "one," but I still made the sentence tighter.]

I crouched down at the end of one row, this one of millet,
I crouched down at the end of a row of millet

This was one of the issues I’d been thinking about.
I'd been thinking about this issue.

One chapter I particularly hated was the one about traveling, which included a text about Fati’s and Ali’s grandfather
One chapter I particularly hated included a text about Fati’s and Ali’s grandfather

That was our one and only date.
That was our only date.

Anton was the only one who figured it out
Anton alone figured it out

I did searches within my manuscript for some of my Wordle biggies: just, one, back, people, like. Here's my new word cloud. I like it so much better than my old one, which had a disproportionate number of generic words as the largest words represented. What do you think now?

More beautiful lines

“I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once."

-John Green
The Fault in Our Stars