Harryette Mullen isn't sure of what she will be doing with her next project. She's not sure whether it will be a book of poems or a biography.
There is a cricket outside, I think. Little bell of an insect.
Back to Mullen. She has worked on and researched about her family history quite a bit. Still there is no specific purpose other than the research. Maybe there is the flirtation with a possible project, but she's not concerned, I don't think, about what will "come" of it. This, I won't lie, makes me uncomfortable. Part of my concern sounds like this, "What's the point of it, then?" or "How can she waste her time that way?". Waste. Her time. Valuable time.
My twitter account just texted me, again.
Since when is a Black woman researching her ancestry in this country a waste of time? Since when is it something that needs to look "productive"? Isn't it enough to know that she is disrupting the narrative of silence, of lost memory, of a story buried? This idea that there has to be a purpose to what she is doing is a very middle-class concern. It is enough that her project is about the project itself. The interesting, exciting and heartbreaking things she has come across during her research suffice. They do not need to exist for a utile purpose. Who said artist have to be producing with every step they take? Who says that books and art-ifacts are the only useable things that an artist can produce? What is production anyway?
Shutters piled up in an alley next to recycle and garbage cans. Bring them home. Tumbleweed in alley rescued as well. Now on love seat. Things discarded. Not thought "utile" anymore. The shutters will hold beloved correspondences. Tumbleweed makes great light accessory.
2 comments:
I believe that if you're always producing, you never produce anything radical. It takes time for radically compelling ideas, the kind that your readers read and go, "omg, I'm in a mental place that I've never, ever been before," to form into your own words.
That's not to say that radical writing is the only writing worth doing. And constant production certainly helps you to form a body, aka a body of work to support and bolster your sense of who you are as a writer. However, radical writing and constant production, I think, are opposite ends of the writer spectrum that can't take place at the same time.
Brilliant, Marlon. Somehow I can't escape the class mentality all the time. This idea that Harryette Mullen is "responsible" for the time she wastes. When in actuality, her research is taking on a huge responsibility, not for herself only. For us as well. That, her time spent on this investigation isn't to produce something is very uncomfortable and yet it pushes up against a presupposition. Very strange, which I like.
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