cross + canvas

For a myriad of historical reasons, we have not had the conceptual ability to name whiteness for what it is—not a particular people, not a particular gender, not a particular nation, but an invitation, a becoming, a transformation, an accomplishment. It was an accomplishment sought after by immigrant group after immigrant group coming to these shores hoping to strip away their ethnic past and claim an American future. Before that it was an accomplishment born of discovery, of European men who discovered their unchecked and unrestrained power over indigenous peoples to claim and rename and alter their worlds. Before that it was an accomplishment born of Christian election and supersessionism that removed Jewish people from the privileged position of being the people of God and replaced them with people who imagined their flesh (white flesh) to be saved and saving flesh.

Fireflies

For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, 'Beautiful and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness' and of impotence. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.

Homegoing was very much an attempt to look at time. More specifically, I wanted to track how something like slavery moved and changed over a very long period of time, how these changes affected people’s lives. Time necessarily distances. This is obvious, of course, but it’s important to think about. If healing looks like being so distanced from the point of trauma that you no longer remember it, then saying “time heals” would be appropriate. Maybe this saying works if the wound that needs healing is small, like a paper cut, and if the body performs the healing function properly. But if the wound is something as large as slavery and colonialism then you need something more than time to heal it, and if the body responsible for healing doesn’t act quickly or correctly, then time only worsens it. It simultaneously distances you from the initial trauma in a way that makes it possible to forget why or how the wound even occurred. This, to me, is what institutionalised racism looks like. In America, it’s what happened when the wound of slavery was not properly addressed and was allowed to fester in myriad ways through racist policy in education, housing, criminal justice etc. for centuries. Those of us alive today may not have had anything to do with slavery, but we have certainly inherited the wound.

We are social animals. We want connection. We want . . . understanding. We want intimacy. But if the terms of that intimacy feel dishonest, or feel only possible with the acceptance of your erasure, then that’s painful. So to say, “don’t let me be lonely” is to say, 'don’t ask me to exist in a position that allows for my own annihilation.'

Vietnamese is a very poetic language, it’s incredibly beautiful. It’s so tender, Vietnamese, there are certain words that I just love… and I feel like shouldn’t be in a book, even, because it’s so beautiful. I do feel, however, that there is a lot of the Vietnamese language in my writing. It’s just invisible. ... It has my…somatic system of Vietnamese-ness embedded within, between each word of the English word, or between the letters of that English word, that when people read it, [they think] ‘oh your work is really strange and poetic’. I don’t think it’s strange and poetic. I think it’s because I lived in Vietnam, I was an immigrant, we were refugees… When I read my work I’m like, this is so Vietnamese, but it doesn’t look like Vietnamese, it doesn’t even sound like Vietnamese… but there is a phantom (I think) sonic volume that is…quiet and silence… And I want to say that silence, that invisibility, is very Vietnamese.

thoughts after watching vietgone

the fear of not having a place to go back to is nothing compared to the fear of vanishing in the middle of that place, the angst of not being able to get to a tremendous immensity doesn’t touch that of being in the middle of tremendous immensity, getting to sea before dawnbreak causes much less misery than trying to resolve my relation with sea, to ease the heart, i should fabricate a bed out of sea, build a house out of tremendous immensity, even if the sea is just one tremendous immensity shredded on a map of belligerent corporations, am i in my region or your region, foreign waters familiar people, foreign people familiar waters, i have seen the line at the bottom of sky crack glimmers of clear light, i lift my gaze, your voice breaks across my ear, all at once a tremendous immensity is slit…

In what we call primordial cultures there was no driving roar of cacophonous city clamor, no skyscrapers that blocked the horizon’s view, nor bright lights that obliterated the starry dome of night’s awe-provoking, mathematical sky. Plainly put, our ancestors were not removed from nature and its continuous outpouring of information. When you have the opportunity to experience the vastness of nature, you become aware of the loudness of silence and its ever-speaking profundity. You gain the liberating perspective of your own smallness and become aware of rhythms and cycles. Not just the obvious change of seasons or climate, but a subtle perception of nature as a living and communicating presence. Plants, animals, stones, sky, metals, water — everything in life is whispering meaning, and with great listening, everything may be understood. That is what a true education is, when that which is being conveyed behind all things is known. This can’t happen from books alone — there’s not enough time. But knowledge can come from a developed intuition; human beings have access to intuition, but like anything, if not cultivated, it remains unknown. Art is a way of “knowing,” an intellectual virtue, and intuition and nature are the elder sisters of art. Art doesn’t seek to imitate the look of nature but represent its essence.