Through my writing for this class, I have worked to try to find a voice that will get people to recognize the lives and struggles of inner city youth. I struggle with portraying myself as a whole person because of the complexity of how I have become who I am today. I want to make my writing accessible to both an academic audience and the community that I'm writing about but, lost within all of that, I also don't know how to explain who I am in relation to my community.
For my second personal essay I wrote about my struggle with speech and language growing up but in looking back at it I realize how difficult it still is to put my home, my childhood and my experiences into words never mind be able to convey how I feel about them. I took you, the academic, through my experience at the Undoing Racism conference in Springfield, and showed you my reactions to the somewhat academic material and environment. I highlighted language, both within the workshop itself and in my reactions through memories that make me extremely aware of my difficulty speaking like rapping on the bus to and from lacrosse games, asking Dorothy what all the words she was using meant, people misunderstanding what I said in Tinson's class and how this language and environment was stifling to me:
The words
choke up
in my throat
wanting
needing
to be expressed
needing
to disagree
not to
oppose you
but because
that
is
who I am
opposition
disagreement
conflicting
feelings
thoughts
ideas
perspectives
breaking down
everything.
I know.
You
do not
know everything
Everything
is not
about you
It is me.
This is me.
These
thoughts
words
scars
eyes
that tell stories
if
you would take
the time
to listen.
They are
mine.
I feel
your energy
your 'presence'
expanding
'filling space'
pushing down
on my chest
as it
expands
with every breath
filled
with your
vocabulary
and your
words
conveying my emotion
the same
words
that you use
against me
...
distributing
your power.
It is
silencing. (Personal Essay, p5-6)
When I explain it like this, without the metaphors or the ambiguity, the academic will see it very differently from the way I would look at it. I am not writing for people to figure out why I dissociate or get reality mixed up with things that never happened. I don't want to be analyzed, I just want to be heard.
I think that was what I was trying to illustrate in Essay 3 when I talked about my professor's reaction to a poem I wrote. She said simply, “very powerful” and I tried to explain the impact of the reader's response on someone who is willing to share such intimate details of their life:
Death is the same now as it was then
my sister’s best friend
saw her mom’s boy friend...
Yesenia was six years old
searching apartments to see if anyone was home
He tried to kill himself after he slit her mom’s throat
They try to be strong for her. No one denies what we know.
But at the funeral there was a room for the kids
Everyone said we were too young to see the casket
And it continues as we grow
Friends stay the night cuz they cant go home
And we start figuring more and more out on our own
We are all that each other has to decipher their lies
They cant deal with what really goes on in our lives
I remember what my best friend once said
She woke up with her baby sitter’s boyfriend in her bed
Her eyes retreat back to the world when she was seven
Her words resonate in me, “I just can’t go through that again” (Essay 3, p3).
Saying that it is important to know when the writer needs help with the content of the actual essay and when they need someone to help them through the therapeutic aspect of what they are talking about. This poem was a reaction to another piece of writing, The Private Worlds of Dying Children by Myra Bluebond-Langner. In reading about her observations of how children with leukemia found out information I reminisced on my own experiences:
I hide under the dining room table pretending to play
Listening hard to hear what they have to say
The heavy air makes it hard for me to breathe
The carpet I slide across burns my knees
I take in what Im not supposed to know
The learning process is slow but if I just don’t show
that every word they say I absorb...
the adults play too with their double-edged swords
I emerge from beneath the table...no longer sheltered
My curiosity remains...my voice left unheard (Essay 3, p3).
I tried to connect to the story in a real and personal way. When asked, “But how did it make you feel? Write about that.” The only response I can think of is that I feel like that same little kid. I go back to that place and that mindset. I become that person again, a person who I feel like I have lost and am desperately trying to recover but can't for the same reasons that I wrote about in the poem. My life has transformed from being a kid sitting under the table listening to the adults talk, oblivious to us and the lives we live as kids, to sitting in class listening to people talk about this author and that theory and the way all these things work with and against each other, unable to understand the lives of the people they are talking about. In the poem I resist the adult world, emphasizing the need for youth to support each other, the overall ignorance of adults and my fear of inevitably becoming one and perpetuating the same system:
And we deal with it, helping each other through tough times
Adults oblivious to the signs
We know every little detail that goes on in their world
Will we be the same way when its our turn? (Essay 3, p3).
The same can be said for my relationship with academia. I feel as though my community should have its own support system, that academia is ignorant of the real issues going on in my community and I am terrified of perpetuating a dynamic that silences young voices.
At the end of my personal essay, I wrapped up with a situation where confronted with a person who was scared to speak up just as I had been for so long, I finally found my voice in order to help him not lose his. I feel as though the ending, while it may seem contrived, was really an accurate portrayal of who I am and the message I want to get across. In responding to the man who was afraid to speak up because he did not want to offend anyone I told him that,
“As scary as it is to put yourself out there, not talking about it only helps to perpetuate system that we're talking about...This is why were here. To understand each other and work through our thoughts. We need to be able to make mistakes, we need to be able to confront them progressively and we need to be able to learn from them. Its all a necessary part of confronting the system” (Personal Essay, p7).
To accurately portray who I am now, I needed to show that I was ready to speak up, if not for myself than for others, because that was what the paper was, speaking up for unheard voices; I needed to show the way I used vocabulary and was able to speak intelligently when I did speak; I needed to show how scared I was, and still am, to speak up in that group (“I laugh, taking a deep breath, trying to stop my voice from shaking” (Personal Essay, p7)); and I needed to show that even after saying it, I went back to being the observer that I have always been. The problem, however is I do not set it up in a way that allows the reader to understand all of that because the person that I was does not have a voice.
The person I was has never had a voice. As a youth in an urban neighborhood, with a very traditional Italian family, a thick Boston accent, a limited vocabulary and having learned english though broken Spanish and Italian, I always felt like no matter how smart I was or what I had to offer I would never get people to understand me. Now, I realize that that is what is missing from my essay.
Upon realizing this, however, I am faced with another dilemma. My story is not about finding my voice; it is about all of the voices that go unheard. While writing, I knew this on some level. The part that I used to attempt to portray the person I was then illustrates the struggle to be heard in a place like where I grew up:
Laughing voices and loudness fills the air. I see people moving up and down over the tops of the seats. I sit curled up at the back of the bus. I am one of the leaders of the team. I know this. On the field I take charge but here, in these social settings, I am passive. I sit back and watch them battle it out. There insults back and forth, a dap and congrats for the illest line dropped. It’s outrageous what we say to each other yet put down, we lift others up, uncaring that we are at the bottom because were having fun. In the end, we know that nothing will change because we know how not to take offense. The music starts and I jump in. Every word flows, listened to time after time, in pain and in happiness, the same rhymes…connecting. Words of meaning. Surrounded by people who know the same feelings and a similar way of life. Then I curl back up again assuming my place until the game starts and I zone into my own world, escaping everything else, concentrating on the ball and letting my body just move naturally, the way my mouth does when I'm rapping. But it was all abandoned for a world of hierarchy and concentration on useless information..(Personal Essay, p1-2).
In looking at this in conjunction with the poem I wrote, I feel like I could really portray the difference between my voice as a child and the voice I have now but in order to do so, I need to somehow get the voices to acknowledge each other.
Every time I go home I become more aware of how I am changing. The first weekend I went home this year was for my friend Adriana's funeral. I sat in the pews of the church among my friends and watched the slide show of photos of her play over and over and over.. remembering the little Chelsea girl with the big attitude that she has always been and seeing the beautiful, smart young woman she was growing to be. We had both gotten into private schools the same year through the lacrosse program we were a part of and come back to coach at the camps we had been going to since middle school together.
Among her family, friends and teammates who contributed something to the eulogy, her advisor from Concord Academy shared his memories of Adriana. He illustrated who she was when she first got to Concord, telling the story of how she had been the only one to take him up on the proposal that his freshman class, after watching the seniors give their final speeches at the end of the year, should write what they would want to say when it comes to be their turn. He read to us some of the less provocative parts and I laughed harder than I thought possible at a funeral. I could hear her say the words, picture her exaggerated body movements and feel her sarcasm. “This is what you're going to leave people with?” he asked her. She smiled. There is no doubt in my mind that she would have gotten up in front of that school and said every word she wrote on those papers. Thats who she was, a Chelsea girl with an attitude and a voice that was never afraid to speak whether or not it was taken seriously. “As I got to know Adriana better, I realized that I really didn't know much about Chelsea. One day I tried to ask her about it. I saw what Chelsea made her but I wanted to know what it meant to her.” He paused for a second. People at private institutions always seem to be so great at giving speeches. “She just smiled at me and giggled. She never explained it, all I know about Chelsea was what I saw in her.” In those few short paragraphs, he nearly brought her back to life. He explained how at the end of her senior year he had given her speech back to her only to be met with the reaction, “You actually kept that.”
The I can show you at this point in my life will never completely be who I was as a child. I can tell you stories for weeks, show you snapshots of my past, family, friends, enemies, teachers and coaches. I can show you Chelsea High School, pointing out the boy's locker room that I had to be escorted through in elementary school for weigh-ins before pop warner foot ball games; the same locker room that my little sister lost her virginity in her freshman year. I can take you up the stairs that I blacked out at the top of every day and into the hall where my best friend told me she had tried to kill herself after her mom pushed her down a flight of stairs. I can explain how different my house was when I taught my little sister how to play lacrosse out on the street or when two more grand parents, or my cousin, or a friend moved in.
But I can never bring that part of me back to life because I will always be interacting with that person as the person I am now. I will always see my community within a greater context. The streets that I grew up playing touch football on are the same streets subject to police profiling. The diverse schools that I went to, where during my freshman year I was informed by my history teacher that racism and the KKK still exist, were all part of a system that work to control black and brown bodies in the name of education. My memories of my cousin stealing my mom's medicine after living with us for a month, court hearings for the custody of his daughter, and child social services showing up at my house were all a part of this larger fucked up system that makes our lives more complicated and less valued. I have grown up as both a part of this system and a part of this community, neither of which really acknowledge each other.
I was recently talking to a professor who was helping me rewrite a paper for his class. “It'll help if you tighten all this up,” he said, explaining about the structure of the paper.
“What do you mean by tighten it up?”
“Well for one...” He turned to the next to last page and pointed at one of the paragraphs. “Stop talking to me like were on the bus to Springfield.”
I laughed, thinking about this essay which I had been working on right before going to the meeting. “But I hate analytical writing.”
“Hey, listen. You're gonna have to use it at times.”
“Sometimes its just too hard to try to get my ideas across using academic language and I have to try to figure out how to make it understandable.”
“This is you're training ground. Someday you're going to need to write a grant proposal for an organization asking for fifty dollars, which isn't a lot of money for organizations.”
“It can be.” I chime in with a smile.
“It doesn't mean you're a different person when you go back home. I go home and I'm not a professor anymore. I mean, they recognize it and everything I've accomplished but they wanna know that your always learning and bringing it back. Otherwise what was the point of sending you to college.”
Being at Hampshire and going to Deerfield Academy and the Mountain School have opened my eyes to more than I ever could have imagined learning about. Growing and changing has always made me feel as though I am leaving a part of myself behind and, in my writing, sometimes I do leave that part of me out. I rewrote my poem from my personal essay to try to explore the ways that I can work to incorporate both my voice now and my voice as a child:
The words
choke up
in my throat
wanting
needing
to be expressed
needing
to disagree
not to
oppose you
but because
that
is
who I am
opposition
disagreement
conflicting
feelings
thoughts
ideas
perspectives
breaking down
everything
I know.
You
do not
know everything.
Everything
is not
about you
It is me.
This is me.
These
thoughts
words
scars
eyes
that tell stories
if
you would take
the time
to listen.
They are
mine.
Don't wanna
hear it?
That's fine.
After all
I was born
in this city
where light
only shines
on the street,
right?
So
I'll spit
for you
from the back
of bus seats
classrooms
curbs
these words
flow
but are
seldom heard
over you.
You must
know best
You must
know me best
right?
Cuz you
continue to
tell me
who I am.
And what
these streets
mean.
I feel
your energy
your 'presence'
expanding
into my community
pushing down
on my chest
as it
expands
with every breath
filled
with your
vocabulary
and your
words
conveying
my emotion
thoughts
beliefs.
Its the
only way to
get you
to take me
seriously.
As a child, I searched and scraped for the words to not just write but speak. My writing was a jumbled mess of figuring out how to say things, how to describe but as I've gotten older my writing has taken on a new purpose. I do not just write to reflect on or work though things I have witnessed or difficult experiences that I've had in my life, though I do do those too. I write to make a point and make you think. Being able to tell my own story while getting the reader to think critically about a concept on a larger scale is a weird middle ground to walk on especially in a world where academia is more valued. Without fusing the world of academics with the practice of storytelling we will never create change. My voice means nothing if it cannot speak for others.
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