Glamouring As a Way [Not] To Live

     2020 C2C PROCESS NOTES

I have been exhausting my self, denying my self rest and calling it “method.” That this post starts in media res is just one indication of this unsustainable habit of mine. Apparently, my inclination to start my writing “in the middle of things,” is not a one-off occurrence but rather a tendency that a professor pointed out to me in graduate school, and not necessarily as a criticism, just an observation. I should have told her that it was because I hadn’t taken a breath in between the words on the last essay/poem/reading response/text message/scream into the void that was behind my shower curtain before beginning my next assignment, never allowing exhaustion to simmer down into some stillness. 

I would find out eventually that being unrelenting with my professional and creative commitments would be harmful to my physical and emotional wellbeing, but the day after my graduation from my master’s program, no one could have warned me, even my mother who was shocked that I was already drawing up reading lists, lists of jobs, lists of fellowships (the ones I hadn’t already been rejected from), lamenting the hindrance to typing caused by the length of my bright yellow graduation acrylics. [These days I’m finding it hard to type without them.] What was a break when I didn’t have a job beyond a part-time summer position or a new lease, with the awareness of tens of thousands of dollars in debt hovering somewhere over my left shoulder, just out of sight but close enough to feel its heavy, anxiety-inducing presence? In subsequent months, every book I read, film I watched, Black visual artist I studied had to be in service of “my project,” the novel I was trying to complete [And now, have completed] and weekends were to steal back the time jobs 1 and 2 had taken from my writing and studying, my social life being confined to fairly rigid time slots decided on far in advance. What was leisure?

If only I could say that this story turns when I realized the ongoing and ultimately deadly scam that is capitalism, that my issue was nothing more than the hubris of a writer believing that being willing to sacrifice reliable healthcare, teeth, dignity, cracked fingernails, sleep and so on would ultimately lead me to the elusive promised land where I could live comfortably on my art alone. If even I believed that “paying my dues” and steeling my self through a little misery would allow me to create more “authentically,” this would be an easier, less long-winding story to recount. 

I’m trying to tell you that the question “What are you willing to do?” was terrifying to me, because I used to believe that the answer to that question meant whatever it took, even if at the expense of my wholeness. I’m trying to tell you that beyond growing accustomed to operating from a place of deprivation and scarcity, I sincerely believed that I was undeserving of anything enjoyable, that if I would do something as self-indulgent (or so I thought) as trying to be a writer or daring to live a life of my own design, I would have to bear every difficult consequence on my own. I’m trying to tell you that I can’t even name what my favorite meal is today, because I have disciplined my self into an unbending strictness where I only buy what is cheapest and will last longest, only what is essential and on the grocery list. I’m trying to tell you that I wasn’t just trying to live some sort of romanticized life of a struggling artist; I’m trying to tell you that what I was doing felt like dying. I’m repeating my self because this is a ritual that I cannot afford to see fail.

This distorted conception of self-punishment as “my lot” and my acceptance (which I’m trying to refuse) of the idea that “this is just how Black women artists have it,” (and by “it” I mean moving from one violent institution to another because “better the devil you know”) has led me to the answer: I am willing to delight in the pleasure of [art]making. From the beginning of the Call to Create, I stated my intention to work on an extended meditation on loneliness—a state of being I learned to hold dear—in the form of a “literary assemblage,” borrowing the idea of collaging and blending from visual artists to create a multimedia work anchored by prose and including photography and video elements. I have been saying I’m thinking about loneliness, but everything I’ve been doing in preparation for my project has been turned towards beauty and what is “too much”; thinking about what I have at my disposal at home, plants, fabrics, family photos, cut flowers, jewelry that hurts to wear for more than a few hours, and the scenes I can create out of these; returning to Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals to try and learn something about what it means to be an ungovernable Black woman.

So, I’m interested in beauty and “glamouring,” not only in the conventional sense of the ostentations and alluring, but in the sense that Arthur Jafa has used it, to describe what he believes to be a tendency we have as Black people to “mesmerize the person who’s acting on us.” I’m interested in the hat Sula wore when she returned to the Bottom and in “the culture of dissemblance” described by Darlene Clark Hine and cited by LaKisha Simmons in Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans to describe the silences in accounts Black teen girls gave about their lives and worlds in Jim Crow era New Orleans. I’m also curious about the silences in the lives of my mother, her mother, her mother, and her mother, the desires and indulgences left unspoken, my own misreading of my great-great-grandmother’s life that took account only of her suffering without knowledge of her love of gold jewelry and her thriving business. [I have been writing in this direction all this time, over all these pages I’ve written about my mothers as unwilling martyrs, about women who eat razors for breakfast, about women who wear each other’s faces, women who live in a house to narrow and low-ceilinged for their spirits]. I hope to find a way to understand and navigate my own glamouring—putting shiny coats of high femininity over my bowed-down spirit and a body in pain—in hopes of finding a more sustainable way of being.

My project feels urgent to me because the other day on the phone my mum expressed concern that I am so “sensible and serious” and slow to laugh at some of her jokes. To an extent, I can trace part of this seriousness to the point where our sense of humor diverges; I simply haven’t lived long enough to shed the hot-headed self-righteousness of a 20-something somebody with strong yet ever-evolving political convictions in favor of the healthy irreverence that comes with age. Then, there is also the fact that by the time I talk to my mum on the phone, I have already spent my light and wit and jokes elsewhere, texted all the memes, one-liners, witty words of encouragement, and can only present my self to my mother as this person with a prickly disposition she can no longer recognize.

 I don’t want to be unrecognizable to the person who always brings me back to my self no matter how detached or disunified I feel. I want to be full and whole all day, not glamouring when I need to and burnt out and flat when I don’t. I need to recognize that misery and exhaustion are not necessary parts of artistic practice nor my life at large. I’m trying to center the feeling of pleasure that comes when I sit with my work, trying not to despair, trying not to dwell on the impossible weight of the responsibility I feel to write and create things that are immediately recognizable as urgent, useful, and “important” to other people. Sometimes we grow tired of suffering and would like to admire our selves and each other. Sometimes we understand that we experience crisis without being of it, that we can bear witness to and care for each other’s pain without dwelling there eternally, that we have access to “love and magic” as Toni Morrison reminds us. Sometimes we imagine a world where we are glamouring because it brings delight and joy and not as a shield against lack and violence. Sometimes we are too much and loving it.