the other elliot

And in the end, we would see, if we could really see - like standing on the moon and looking is one perspective, and then you can stand even farther out, and when you stand way, way, way out there, you see how it all fits together, and you see how we're all related and how the stories hook up and how everybody, everybody's story is absolutely necessary for the whole - everybody, including the creatures, including, you know, including the elements, including the animals, that all of our stories are important to the story matrix."

aside from one ableist descriptor, this piece is something to be savored, especially for those of us stripped of cultural markers like language. i'm holding it close and feeling it deep.  "The government came to us first in the form of the Cavalry, then the military fort ... and finally the boarding school. The government didn’t simply 'teach' us English in those boarding schools—they systematically and methodically took our Mojave language. They took all the words we had. They even took our names. Especially, they took our words for the ways we love—in silencing us, they silenced the ways we told each other about our hearts. ... Despite Cavalries and boarding schools, our language is still beautiful and passionate—it carries in it the ways we love and touch each other. In Mojave, to say, Kiss me, is to say fall into my mouth. If I say, They are kissing, I am also saying, They have fallen into each other’s mouths.  The word for hummingbird is nyen nyen, and it doesn’t mean bird—it is a description of what a hummingbird does, moving into and out of and into the flower. This is also our word for sex. Mat ‘anyenm translated to English means the body as a hummingbird, or to make a hummingbird of the body. On a very basic level we have a word that means body sex hummingbird all at once.  ... Maybe there is no great lesson to be learned here, but when I sit down to write a poem, I carry all of this language with me onto the page—I try to figure out what I really mean, what the words really mean to me. I don’t ever want to say, love, if what I mean is wakavar, if what I mean is hummingbird, if what I mean is fall into my mouth."

"They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterns. The first he’d seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black tale blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond."

Between the Lines: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with Zadie Smith

"TODAY I am a writer, but I also see myself as something of a landscape artist. I paint pictures of scenes for inner-city youth that are familiar, and I people the scenes with brothers and aunts and friends they all have met. Thousands of young people have come to me saying that they love my books for some reason or the other, but I strongly suspect that what they have found in my pages is the same thing I found in 'Sonny’s Blues.' They have been struck by the recognition of themselves in the story, a validation of their existence as human beings, an acknowledgment of their value by someone who understands who they are. It is the shock of recognition at its highest level. ... I realized that this was exactly what I wanted to do when I wrote about poor inner-city children — to make them human in the eyes of readers and, especially, in their own eyes. I need to make them feel as if they are part of America’s dream, that all the rhetoric is meant for them, and that they are wanted in this country."

Oaxaca desde adentro, Inside Oaxaca, Diego Huerta

"Bones have consciousness. Within marrow is memory."  "I turned on the television, the story box that changed the story field of the world. The commercial aspect of stories threatens the diversity of the world's stories and manners of telling. The television stands in the altar space of most of the homes in America. It is the authority and the main source of stories for many in the world."  "I let go. I let it go in beauty, with love, in the spirit of compassion. I let my thoughts of forgiveness for myself and for others in the story follow the waves of the ocean in prayer."

lovin' on this piece, particularly these bits — " … when someone makes up their mind to perceive you in a certain way, any and everything you do, no matter how well-intentioned, will be skewed to fit the narrative of you that the person has playing over and over in their head." "Clarity is invaluable. Delusion, especially about ourselves, is counterrevolutionary." "Accountability has been the most significant concept of the last year for me. I live in a place where everyone talks about accountability and almost no one practices it … Luckily, my close friends are people who also value accountability and seeing their examples make me feel like it’s maybe possible. Maybe. In any case, I continue to value it and practice it in my own life and will continue to seek out people who do the same."

"Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied." 

— Guillermo Gómez-Peña

" … the inevitable questionnaire would accompany my contract in which I was to check off my RACE: CAUCASIAN, BLACK, NATIVE AMERICAN, ASIAN, HISPANIC, OTHER … what was Hispanic? A census creation—there was no such culture—how could it define who I was at all? Given this set of options, the truest answer might have been to check of OTHER." "Where I looked for company was where I always looked for company since coming to this country: in books … I began to educate myself by reading, and that is when I discovered that there were others out there like me, hybrids who came in a variety of colors and whose ethnicity and race were an evolving process, not a rigid paradigm or a list of boxes, one of which you checked off." "I began to hear the language "in color." I began to see that literature could reflect the otherness I was feeling, that the choices in fiction and poetry did not have to be bleached out of their color or simplified into either/or. A story could allow for the competing claims of different parts of ourselves and where we came from." "My Latino-ness is not something someone can take away from me or leave me out of with a definition. It is in my blood: it came from that mixture of biology, culture, native language, and experience that makes me a different American from one whose family comes from Ireland or Poland or Italy. My Latino-ness is also a political choice. I am choosing to hold on to my ethnicity and native language even if I can "pass." I am choosing to color my Americanness with my Dominican-ness even if it came in a light shade of skin color."