Writing Out Loud

I love writing. But it wasn’t always that way. I started out wanting to be a comic book artist. When I was in junior high, I would often fake being sick just so I could stay home from school and draw and create stories (I think my mother knew, but still indulged me from time to time). I never realized I was writing back then, as my focus was so much on the art. But all that changed my freshman year in a ninth-grade English class when my teacher, a middle-aged white woman with stylish graying hair and a strange affection for Calypso music, gave us the classroom assignment of writing a brief autobiography. What I turned in started like this: “I grew up through a maze of comic books and dreams designed to break down the poverty of a childhood existence. Oh, the sweetness of those days, wrapped in bitter melancholy, still stamped upon the envelope of my mind….” The next day she took me aside and said that I had a gift for stringing words together, and that I should consider pursuing the ideal of being a writer. I tell this story because I wasn’t a good student; at best I was average and borderline failing. For a young black kid coming of age in 1966 at a very tumultuous time in the history of our country, what that teacher said had a very profound effect on me and who I was to become. This was reinforced several years later in a creative writing class taught by a young, first-year graduate teacher. Fresh out of college and just barely outside my dating range, she taught me metaphor and similes; put the rhyme in alliteration; and personified the language of description in the corrections she made to each bit of poetry and prose I handed in. She kept me from failing high school and sang my praise in a poem that was later published in a small literary magazine. She believed in me as a writer long before I believed in myself. I read somewhere once that the word educate, at its root, means “to draw out,” that the essence of the intellect is already there waiting to be coaxed into being. As the statue residing at the heart of the stone is dependent on the skill of the sculptor to release the image, so too are the aptitudes of the student dependent on the skill of the teacher “to draw out” the best in him/her. To this day I am indebted to teachers who look beyond the stereotypes, gruff exterior and surly attitude, to recognize the vast potential that resided within; to see the deeper value of the persons placed in their charge. To this day I feel blessed. I love writing. I know I’m just repeating myself, but to watch words magically appear across the blank screen of a white page is a very enjoyable experience. For a while I wasn’t really sure if I loved the craft enough. I remember the passion I had for it when I was younger and the seeds were first sown, and the sprouts of imagination unfurled themselves to push their way up through the hard soil of grit and grammar, and between the cracks of writer’s block. In those days I feasted on writing as if it were a final meal or some forbidden fruit I had never tasted before. Locked away in the hot, shadowy comfort of my attic room, I’d sit hunched for hours over the small keyboard of my older brother’s portable gray typewriter, plotting and pecking out the drama of make-believe lives. I think that’s what I love most about writing. The fact that I get to fool around with history —that of others as well as my own—and that I get to weave it into a pattern of a whole other reality and come up with a garment of my own design. If I do this skillfully enough, I give answer to the secret musings we’ve all had at one time or another of asking, “What if?” What if things had been different and I had been born a girl…or a different color…or on a different continent? My God, I can only imagine…but as a writer I get to do more than just imagine. I get to make it so. I no longer doubt my love for the craft. Though not as all-consuming as it once was—when I was just an ingénue in that shadowy closed-off attic—the passion is still there; the desire a perennial urge that keeps returning day after day and year after year, growing more colorful in its expression with each passing season. At this point, writing is more a blessing than it will ever be a curse—partly because I tentatively comprehend the mechanics of words, but mostly because I appreciate and understand the power of words. There is a theory that exists within the context of conjectural African thought; it is the theory of Nomo: the power of the spoken word. In philosophical African reflection, words have a huge influence on how things are perceived and initiated. In his culturally celebrated book, Muntu, author Janheinz Jahn assert that awareness of this fact alone can reshape and alter our world. He goes on to explain: “That every human thought, once expressed, becomes reality” and that words not only initiates and sustain the course of things, but are also transformative. Because they have this power, “every word is an effective word” and “every word is binding.” Within the notions of Nomo, there’s no such thing as a “harmless, noncommittal word—every word has consequences. Therefore, the word binds the Muntu (man), and the Muntu is responsible for his word.” If I apply this concept to my writing, then every word that I type or scribble is useful in the context of the conversation I’m seeking to initiate. This is what we are all taught in English 101, to make our words count.