Thursday, January 6, 2011

To: home being where the voice is.

Sometimes the wideness of a horizon is scary. Just the sea and you, you know?
I am thankful that I have for the most part kept quiet and to myself, it comes in handy these days. That works well off-stage.

I have found myself in such a strange place when coming to performance poetry. I have written no new performance pieces since I came here, most likely because of my resisting the notion of having to re-construct how I create work or broaden my motives when it comes to my writing. I have spent so much time and energy creating culture-specific work back at home, that when coming to here, it's like I hardly even know where to start.

I have an enormous sense of my schooling here being a temporary process and something that will pass before I know it. It's like I want no connection with the place, and everything is transitory. My anti-assimilationist attitude is the very thing creating writing problems for me. If what I believe in is about communicating a message, then communication is paramount to that goal, and communication can get culture-specific at best.

It goes beyond the issue of dialect and accent and references, because those obstacles should only propel me. It's the idea of not being clear about what it is I want to accomplish here. Over the last 5 years it was the restoration of a culture, working towards a sort of 'healing' from where we were at that point as a country (Trinidad). That goal becomes somewhat irrelevant here. Inapplicable.

One might argue that there are things that stretch over from place to place...God, gender, pan-africanism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism....but all these ideas work within a context and a way of reaching people. It's hard to end up doing something you love in a place you've always hated.

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