To the Ones Who Apologize for Their English

I love your English.

I love how you speak. I love when you switch one word for another. I love how you try on accents and word order. I love the sound of your voice as you turn sounds and patterns from your language into mine. I love how you accidentally say scandalous things and we laugh not because you embarrassed yourself but because language tricks us all. Language is a game like tag--someone, somewhere made up the rules and it’s silly and we can break them and you just did and how silly those rules were in the first place. 

I love how you write. I love your “broken” sentences. I love the surprising choice of periods and commas. I love that sentences don’t always have clear beginnings or endings. I love how the point isn’t correctness but the idea. I love how an idea can come through in the barest construction of words. I love the meaning you convey in your hands and body and how that somehow also comes out in your writing in English.

I love how you say what you mean. I love that there is not enough artifice in your vocabulary to hide. I love how you choose between silence and speaking the truth. This is how I know how much you mean what you say when you speak. I listen. I stop what I am doing to hear you out.

I love how you turn familiar images on their head.  I love how you reach for words and find metaphors I never could imagine. You are a poet. A magician. You do things with English that I will never be able to do because it is as familiar to me as my earliest memory; I can’t remember where it begins and ends. But you! You know that language cannot say everything there is to say. You speak suspended above saying and not saying and the impossible to say--and you still reach out to me from the place of great uncertainty.

And still you assume that I don’t like your words. You assume that your English is not correct. I know you assume this because you tell me. You say, “I know those aren’t the right words.” You say, “Please don’t judge me.”

How can I convince you that this is not true?

I know how much I love you can be hard to believe or understand. After all, I am someone who helps other people say what they are trying to say--in English. I am a writer who is only fluent in English. Who no matter how hard she has tried, despite living in Bulgaria for a year, never got past the toolset she needed to negotiate with taxi drivers. 

And when you ask me how to say something in “standard English”, I tell you. I help you NOT because your language is wrong. I do this because you said a remarkable and perfect thing. I do this because all language is translation from meaning into words that other people will understand. I am your translator, not your editor. I change your words only when you ask me to do so and only when changing them would help you be understood.

Please never speak “perfect” English. There is no “perfect English” because “English” does not exist.  There is only my English. And her English. And their English. And yours. You have created English in your mouth and hands just as all of us have done. English belongs as much to you as it does to me.

Language is alive. There can be no inferior living being. We only create language systems for connection, for expression, for understanding. Language belongs to the living and serves them alone. You are alive and so it is yours.

Please stop apologizing for your English. I am not horrified or upset by how you speak or how you write. I love them both. Because I love you. Have I mentioned that I love you?

The Anti-Gift Guide for Artists

You're about to see and receive a string of gift-giving guides for 2020 holidays. And in that pile of guides, you may have someone in your life who identifies as an “artist” or “writer” or “creative.” Someone that you think, “You know what? I bet this person I love would be super into… [insert work/art/craft related gift here.]”

I'm here to stop you. Put down the google. Don't touch it. Listen closely as I share my one-step anti-guide to meaningful gift giving for the artists and makers in your life.

Step #1: Don't give them presents related to their craft. Because you're going to get it wrong.

Step #2: The above. There's nothing else.

I say this as a writer. As a lover of words. As someone who has been gifted an inordinate number of notebooks and pens in my life. As presents. As thank yous. As “I saw this and thought of you.”

Did I feel loved? Yes.

Did I use that gift? Never.

Why? Because I'm picky AF. Because we as artists and creatives are picky AF.

We don't use just any notebook; we have a specific brand, a specific paper weight, a specific (and immovable) choice of grid/lined/unlined/sketchbook. We must have the spine open a certain way, the pen feel a certain way across the page. We will only use one brand of paint, only one set of brushes that get touched daily. ONLY ONE. And as much as you love us, you aren't going to guess which one in the wide world of supplies we choose to use.

So stop gifting the almost-accurate-but-ultimately-unusable object. Please.

It's okay if you've made this mistake in the past. Your love was felt. It mattered. That's why we never told you to your face. So don't feel bad about it. It's okay. You know now.

If you really do want to give us supplies, ask us for specifics first. You can ask for directions. It's okay. We won't be mad.

The Exploitation of Art Activism

Activist Art is having a Moment. And by moment, I mean a Golden Age. Where the images we use and the words we write are all inherently, unavoidably political. They say something about us and about the world we want to create.

 What do the things we make from our creativity change in the world? Who are we talking to? What do we hope to change?

And so I find the mural on the new Black Lives Matter Plaza delightfully aggressive towards the Temporary Resident in the White House.

The images we use and the words we write are all inherently, unavoidably political as in the technical definition of the word "political" which is rooted in "polis" meaning "the city" so meaning "having to do with the well being of the citizens of that city."  What we make and what we say communicate political realities: something about us and about the world we want to create and how it ought to change right here and now.

Which is why there's more to the story of this particular mural.

Black Lives Matter has specific and particular demands, ones that the city of DC has yet to enact while also bearing responsibility for the patterns of gentrification that have altered city neighborhoods in toxic ways. And you better believe there were DC police involved in the rampant abuse of protestors and journalists throughout the recent demonstrations. Google: Swann Street.

Putting paint on the ground is both a true act of defiance AND an act of brand shifting and pattern matching with public opinion.

A fact that must be stated: Black well-being is the heart of a thriving DC. All of the interesting things about this city comes from Black Culture. Go-go music. Hand dancing. Murals. Community design.

And most recently, Black DC and its cultural forms have been asked to devote their art to institutions who want to adjust their brand image but have not actually aligned their actions to the Movement. Instead, the institutions now see that they will be left behind if they don’t release the right PR statement. And the use of art to make this appearance shift is startling.

That's why the People added the lines "Defund the Police." The art is not simply aimed at President Trump. Protestors insisted that Black Lives Matter has something to do with the local city as well as with the President. Writing this was taking back the BLM statement that had been used to paint a specific picture of the city government.

Art should not be co-opted to "white-wash" cultural institutions who have suddenly realized that if they do not change their scripts on BLM that they will, in fact, lose money and cease to exist. The livelihood of American capitalism is attached to the labor of the black body--it has always been. Will we begin to commit to the THRIVING of the Black Body, the Black Artist as well?

How do we stop our making from exploitation?

• Take no payment in “exposure”.

• Give generously to those who need what you have and to whom you want to give your skill.

• Speak loudly.

• Ask for the proof points of how a client will use your work.

• Discern whether the work is for appearance or for change.

These steps are true whether or not your art is currently “about” justice and activism. Your art can be abstract or purely technical. It can be  a luxury, superfluous to survival. That's not what this is about.

We must ask who is doing what with our work and do we believe in that act? And are we being exploited in how we create?

And as collectors, curators, consultants, directors, the theater owners, Boards of Directors, program managers, writers, reviewers: how will you lead your organization to not exploit the work of artists, particularly Black artists in this time?

 "Lifting up the voices of the oppressed" is not code for a new marketing strategy.

Voice and Intimacy in Robinson's "Lila"

“Someday, she would tell him what she knew.”

Marilynne Robinson, “Lila”

Marilynne Robinson writes like fine wine: she takes her time in years and the result is rich, heady prose. Gilead won the Pulitzer 10 years ago. The epistolary novel came 24 years after her novel Housekeeping, a text well received in literary circles. The wait has been worthwhile. In every piece, fiction or nonfiction, Robinson’s prose changes, and what Robinson has done in her most recent work, Lila, is something altogether different from her accomplishments in Gilead. Robinson still uses her great strength: vivid first person perspective, intimate details, and her lyric tone. But the language and pacing of Lila veers in a different, earthy direction, towards the genuine voice of a different economic class.

Published in Curator Magazine