Top 11 Moments of 2011

In no preferential order:

1. Labour Day- West Indian Parade.
Carnival for me always needed to have meaningfulness, and for that, the most sensible part of the celebration for me is J'ourvet. This year we had dinner for our Dimanche Gras at a backyard party at my roomate's friend's house. We went back to my apartment and tried to get some school work done...fail. We left home at around 5:30am to meet the bands. The beauty here is in the coming together of all parts of the Caribbean and all our variations of the mas. It was wonderful to play J'ourvet again after so long, the laughing, the people, the colours, the drums, the iron, the after-tiredness. THERE WERE NO ELECTRONIC MUSIC TRUCKS WITH DJ's ON THEM. The ritual was returned, and it was wonderful.



2. Trip Back Home.
This was interesting to me for the most bit. It really helped me to evaluate life and put things into perspective. The things I want to change when I get back, the things I want to do for my parents when I start making the money, the friends who are really friends, the family that does not ever forget you. How much I have changed and been forced to grow over the last year. It was a time for observing, rest and learning.

3. Californication i.e. Vacation in California
I went out to spend time with my uncle and his family. Northern California is a beautiful place. The weather may be a tad chilly for Summer time, but at least it's consistent and less extremes than this end of the continent. They showed me a really good time, Cooked me loads of food, took me shopping, taught me things about my grandmother that I did not know before, they even indulged my laziness. Chillwave music is my west coast discovery. I miss the frozen yoghurt shop too. Low fat and delicieux!




4. Brave New Voices 2011.
What can I say? BNV is always magical. The difference in this year was being able to sit back and see young people confront fear, push through struggle and overcome themselves. It is always an adventure and nurturing experience to be around Youth Speaks. I'm already looking forward to working with them in 2012. BNV is the cause of so many long-lasting friendships and networkingships in my life. The work is work and is sacred.

5. Parents' Vists.
My mom came in August and my dad passed through NY in October. I am overly happy to have had spent one on one time with them. Our relationships have changed, now that we're all adults :) and so my relating to them has changed. They respect me and my decision making and continue to offer guidance when needed. I love and appreciate them both, so much.


6. Relationships.
The people around you will always be shifted to make room for other people. I can say at this point that I am so gracious to God for surrounding me with so many beautiful people. I am thankful for every single one. It seems as though I am one called especially to love over distances. My boyfriend, my parents, my family, Kelby in France, Dej and Ivy back home, even Jar was away for the holidays. The people far away from me are always the ones I am closest to. The earth ain't that big though. Also, I am forming some really meaningful relationships with college faculty, committed to help me in any way they can.

7. Changing majors to read for a BA in Theater and Social Change.
If you know me well enough, you would know how much of a dream is being attained here.

8. Relevant Work
It is the most rewarding feeling to sit in a classroom, and learn about what you are actually interested in learning about. This year I've been able to dabble in Black Theatre and African American music classes. Both very theoretic and academic approaches to the artforms, but very edifying and helped me to rearrange my thoughts on our work and our process. Theater and music is about life. Classes like these have helped me understand why we live how we live.

9. Relevant Work (Part 2)


My teaching assistant job with Brian has progressed through its first year and it has been a wonderful learning experience for me to be on the other side of the class room. It is remarkable how much these classes actually align themselves to what I would like to accomplish professionally when I go back home. Who knows, maybe I might be able to design an entire syllabus on performance poetry in due time. Matter of fact, heh. I will.

10. Making the Brooklyn College Slam Team.
Confession: I hate slamming. It is unnecessarily nerve-wrecking and unsettling. I am however elated to be part of this historical formation of the first ever BC Slam team, and I look forward to raising awareness on campus on the artform, and looking for ways to expand our work beyond the mic and stage and do some innovatively impressive performance ish. I am looking forward to building this team, this club and this campus. P.S. They've started an unoffical cypher club on campus, and this gets me excited. 2012 is also a year for new misogyny-free rap writing and feminist owning of these cyphers. I'm about to challenge myself.



11. Discoveries on art and process.
My Directing and Performance Technique classes in the last semester have done much to raise my level of self discovery and themes that constantly appear in my work. These themes are Ritualism, Feminism, Multiculturalism, use of Language and Music as a subtext. These seem to be influences that I cannot escape from at any given point. I'm chill with them though :)

Re:Placing

Tonight I sat down to have thanksgiving dinner at a table of women. Two generations and dozens of stories apart. The one next to me is Haitian and asks whether I am going to remain in America after school, and I never think about it when people ask me this question. There is no hesitation to my 'No', and she recounts to me that she said she would come here for five years. She is now well beyond forty years of living in New York.

A friend had asked me the same question last night, told him I didn't see the point in having to exert myself for survival here when I could live comfortably with house and land on a quiet-enough island where the ocean doesn't freeze over in the loaf-end months. I can see the enticement of the opportunity here, but if you step back far enough, it's always a carrot-bait type of situation, and I'm just not that kind of horse. I understand it though. I understand the West Indian obsession with Brooklyn, we always move, waves at a time.

Two of my sisters (God bless the hearts of these women) tonight asked where I wanted to live eventually, and whether I would stay in New York. At this point I feel like the universe is asking me to shape a clearer definition of myself and prodding me in the direction of a work I started this week. In creating a performance for a class project, I am beginning to form my first one-woman show, on the questions of destiny and identity and trusting dreams.

More doors have been opening than I had keys to. God has been remarkably gracious to me in the last few months, and this year has been one of so much growth for me as a person. I am trying to expand beyond the US as of next year, I need to get hold of some scholarships and grants, but these things have already been surfacing. I have some key people at this point in my life that I am drawing experience from, and this is definitely a time of growth for me. I have been more grateful for life in this last week than I have ever been in my life.

Building.

To: Turning Tides in Concrete.

Because of how academic school can actually get, I've had less time to make contributions into this blog and I decided to just get it done tonight, without planning to in advance. At this point, I'm taking a number of courses that have absolutely no eventual bearing on my theatre BA, because quite frankly, I'm over the idea of getting a theatre BA. I'm taking courses that will help my in my career goals in working with youth and community, a feminism course here, an African American music course there, a performance technique course in another corner. I am satisfied and comfortable with my decision to study what I want to study contrary to department advisory. certification is not skill.

I'm transitioning to a Master's program hopefully next year around this time I will be in Grad School getting my hands dirty with actual community theatre as opposed to the broadway factory. Speaking of which, we have another great community of students that we're building with this year in the College Now class. You can see some of our work at: www.bcintrototheater.wordpress.com . It's always super exciting for me because American youth have such a non-shy willingness to engage in the classroom, and have a confident, fearless way about voicing issues affecting them, something I'm not sure I and my friends were doing when I was their age. It's refreshing, all the time.

I feel like I've also been transitioning into the world of bilingualism. Or at least, some version of Spanglish. I'm not sure where it came from, I blame my latino class two semesters ago, I blame California and la casa de Erika Cespedes in Oakland, I blame the burritos. I blame my heightened awareness of Hispanic culture in my neighborhood. Yarminiah and the stories of her family in Miami, the misa in Spanish after ours on Sundays at church, the conversations over my head in packed trains, I blame buena vista social club and how they all seem so perfectly grandfatherly. I blame Cuba and how it appears to me everywhere in my consciousness. I do not know where it came from. But I know that God had me do it for seven years and promised that I would have use for it in the future. Maybe part of the plan is that the language is revived in me somehow. It's weird though. One morning I wake up and I start thinking in Spanish.

With all of the #occupy events taking place throughout New York, the arrests, marches all over the world, the curfew back home being extended, troy davis, tuition hikes, poverty spreading, war, I sense like the whole world is breathing heavily in some kind of syncopated sighing. It is heavy, it is heated, it is heaving. I see and hear it with my young people. The world is frustrated. It isn't even deniable anymore. Everybody is fed up of the way things are. There is some kind of uneasiness happening in the air, and that is public knowledge. Everybody seems to be at their ends. These are tense times.

Finally, I'm about to get around to doing what I really came to New York to do, i.e. building my career as a writer and performance artist. I'm about to slam in this upcoming week, so I've just been trying to prepare myself for it, and trusting that the dry spell of the last year performing-wise had a purpose to it in terms of my growth creatively.I feel like the time has gotten here, and I'm about to put my best foot forward into this. I feel like I've been given enough space in my schedule this semester for concentrated writing and crafting my work, and I am all about making it happen. Ready. Tell the tide time to turn.



"I keep silent, till he would order me to speak, and lift the spell over the world so I could wake dem from dey sleep"

To: The West Indian Day Parade and the Question of Culture.

Photo taken from: Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/06/west-indian-day-parade-2011_n_950135.html#s350250

It's clearly been a while since I've written here, I told a friend this week that I would, and I strive to keep things I give, like promises and such. In that way it becomes half theirs, half mine.

Last weekend was the Labour (yes, that's a 'u' in there, get an English dictionary) Day weekend, and as is customary out here in New York, they had a number of festivities and events all culminating in the street parade on the Monday's holiday. I had missed it all last year, so that this year I sought to do all things West Indian.

On the holiday, two friends crashed at my apartment for our quiet version of Dimanche Gras, and we left home around 5:50am to look for the bands. When we found them, we pretty much just stood along the sides, watching the parade, when one of my friends fell under a strain of culture shock. Her argument was that "this is why feminism is pointless" RE: the behavior of some of the women in the street and their widespread demoralization that seemed to be spilling every which way on the street. I'm thinking that this was why I had distanced myself from Carnival in the first place back at home. It was just the sense of defeat that came from seeing women act a particular way in response to men, not just in dancing, mere behavior, even as an isolated factor, and thinking to myself...so...these are the sisters I'm fighting for...right?

but so goes the story of liberal feminism. here is where the ideology and I meet in the middle of the highway and I refuse to stop and let her in my car. matter of fact, I start speeding. This is my own conviction, and I'm allowed to have one of those. That said,

I really wished I had a camera though (Thank God I didn't), there were so many moments that could have been captured, the sunrise, the masqueraders, the music in the bodies of people, it was beautiful. One thing I am most appreciative over is the traditional music they use for J'ourvet. There are no speaker boxes on music trucks. There are riddim sections, pan-sides, iron-men/women and drums. It was the most organic expression of J'ourvet I've ever been part of.

In the afternoon we spontaneously decided to go to the Parkway for the 'last lappe' which closes off at 6pm, and jumped on a train around 4:40ish to get to President street at around 5pm. We walked out to the corner of Nostrand and Eastern Parkway, after crawling through the most tense, congested crowd I think I've ever been in. 'Tense' because there was some heaviness beyond the humid, beyond the bodies, something was just off. We get to the barricade at the end of the street, and 3 seconds after a woman behind pushes against me and when I turn around, there is a tide of scampering people running towards us and then a shot, sounding like hot ice exploding in a plastic bottle. No echo. Contained. Like a body had absorbed the shock of it.

About 3mins later we were on the train platform, waiting to jump on to the next thing that would take us away from there. My hands were shaking, I could barely text my other friend to tell him to turn his car around and head back home. I got back to my neighbood with an off-beat breathing and a quiet panic in my step. First time for everything, maybe.

After having a week to reflect, I started to think of the 24shootings in 24hrs phenomenon that happened throughout NY state on the Labor Day weekend. Why is it specifically this weekend, when everything is dedicated to "West India" that all these acts of violence happen and at such a rate? I started to question whether it was an issue of us having imported so much of our culture to New York and whether it reflects the increasing violence in our own island home societies. I'm not sure how much of the integrative process of young Caribbean men coming into the New York setting involves some kind of introduction or even re-introduction to criminal activity or behavior, but I'm at a loss for words over the hint of the idea that there may be some cultural connection to the violence. I hope not, but I don't want to dismiss it entirely just yet.

All in all, the day had been mostly enjoyable one for me, but punctuated by few mins that could have cost me my life. I think there can be some more substantial evaluation to take place here.

To: a halfway migration.

I'm currently testing out a new cyberspatial location. I might just use this blog for my journal-type entries and use my new tumblr page for all other things fancy etc.

find me and follow me: http://anayajahzara.tumblr.com/ get to it.

To: Everything We Borrow and Keep as Our Own.

I wonder how difficult it is to embrace the work of the independence movement for the average young person living in a neo-colony like Martinique or another Département D'outre-Mer when that life is all you have known since you have known yourself. What do the names of Cesaire and Fannon register as in the minds of the population within my age group? France and the other respective metropoles (inclusive of the United States) are still the idealist societies and cultures, sought to be replicated in a context of life that continues to not need or benefit from it.

I remember my aunt saying last week of her mother that she reminisces of the days of the British Empire and that if Trinidad was still a colony then we would not have had the crime problem that we do now. I didn't think there were elders who still thought like that. Regardless of how emotional I may feel over a sentiment like that, what I should come to acknowledge is that not everyone is/was in favor of Independence, which actually gives enough evidence of itself in the very word 'dependence'. It is as simple as that.

My friend in Martinique has always wanted to be a model. I recently saw a studio shot of her in a social network update and clearly she is on her way to establishing herself in that career. What struck me however, was how the lighting was arranged and how much more lighter skinned she had been made to look. A stark contrast from her normal, everyday moment, smiling with family and friends photos. It made me consider what is it that we are willing to sacrifice to come by the 'ideal' image or the 'ideal' set of circumstances. What are the type of compromises we are willing to make to get from point A to point B?

How much of ourselves are we willing to lose, to gain some type of perfection by someone else's standards.

To: the promise in Eden.

the poem will not write itself.
the sun will not move to midday position at moontime.
breakfast would not find your stomach through osmosis.
weeds grow where they want, stifle the legit ones,
labor is pain only when you're on your back.
or a maternity ward.
or both.
labor is the world moving itself quarter seconds at a time
how force gets applied to the moving of things.
how the moving of things comes by effort
how everything comes by effort,
how loving you the right way is only by measure of effort.
and Baba said all work is prayer.
I am praying with all the effort in me.

Arielle John

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