jakebe | Entries tagged with race

This weekend was largely productive! I spent a great deal of time working through emails we've received in our New Fables account and making sure we started sending out responses to people; we're not quite out of the woods yet, but a great deal of the thicket has been cleared. It's been really interesting reading through the submissions we've received. (I'm a slush-pile reader for New Fables, by the way). It's a great window into what tends to get thrown our way with poems and short stories, and there's a tremendous spread of talent out there. As I read more and more submissions, I find that my senses on what makes a good story (or poem!) are fine-tuning. There's a certain 'je ne s'ais quoi' that's usually apparent within three paragraphs or so that tells me if I'm intrigued enough to continue. That sense isn't developed enough where I feel I can safely reject a story by that point, so I usually end up reading the whole thing if I can. But often, my first instinct serves me well.

My writing work hasn't been going quite as well. I wanted to write a short story for this year's "Heat," and while it's proven to be more difficult than I thought it would be I haven't given up on it just yet. I've just given up on it being written in time for this year's "Heat". :)

There's been a great conversation over the past several months about diversity in sci-fi/fantasy. People have talked a lot about how novels and short stories don't serve women or people of color very well, and I'm really glad that people are having this discussion now. As a black man, I haven't really noticed a dearth in people like me in sci-fi novels, but I can't lie -- if someone wrote a modern fantasy that featured characters from say, inner-city Baltimore, I'd read the hell out of it! I think there's an opportunity for folks like me to tell stories that are influenced by their background; it makes them unique in flavor and perspective, but if the story's good enough it can be relatable to just about anyone. If I can put myself in the shoes of the young white male protagonist, for example, there's no reason why someone else couldn't imagine themselves as a young black guy.

I feel like I have a fairly unique background and perspective. I'm a gay, black Buddhist who grew up in inner-city Baltimore and consciously made the decision to distance myself from my family and my culture. To a large extent, my sexuality catalyzed that distance, but I'm sure I could reach out and reconnect with certain members of my family at this point. But to be honest, I don't want to. The reasons for that are complicated, messy and (if I'm really honest) shameful and wince-inducing -- all ripe material for stories, as it turns out! I want to use my life experiences to fuel my writing in some significant way. I would really like to emerge as an off-center voice in the chorus of furry/sci-fi/fantasy literature.

But in order to do that, I have to write. My story idea for "Heat" involved a zebra taking her rabbit boyfriend to a family function for the first time. I wanted to make a conscious choice with the species for each character, to use them as a sort of shorthand/analog for societal, racial and background types. The zebra "coming home" to a world that she remembers and struggles to reconcile with is a theme that resonates with me; I wanted to explore the tension I feel between the life I have now and the one I've left behind. How has the zebra changed in her many years away from her family? How will she be seen by the people she left behind? What traits have she kept, which ones has she buried only to have re-emerge in proximity to her family? Will this contact to her old world help her synthesize these two parts of herself?

I often wonder about this sort of thing. I'm a minority that comes from a distinct culture, making a go at joining the majority culture (sort of). I know I could be seen by a lot of people as an Uncle Tom, an Oreo, a race-traitor. Someone could say easily that I've forgotten where I've come from. But you know what? It's not true. I remember where I came from all the time, and it's a big reason why I'm here instead.

It turns out the themes I want to explore in this story aren't quite easily done in a 5,000 word piece of erotica. I need more time with the idea, to see how it relates to the characters whose story I'm telling, to see how I can juggle this kind of subject matter in a short story. It turns out you can't really pick at old wounds on a lark.

So, in order to get my writing mojo back for now, I'll fall back to something that's a bit easier for me to bang out: macro stories! I have a fun little piece that I'm working on for Megamorphics, and I'll try to use a few writing.com interactives as a sort of 'stretching exercise'. I'll be using these little story bits to focus on the skills I feel I'll need to tell the zebra's story -- a clear sense of character and history, the ability to use setting to set a mood, how to pack in complicated detail in simple-sounding paragraphs. Meanwhile, Leticia and Dale will have to wait for next year's "Heat".

I had to wrestle with this one for a little bit, and it's still not quite where I'd like it to be. I'll be spending the summer fine-tuning most of these I think -- they're not bad enough to scrap completely, but they're not good enough not to need some massive retooling, either.

It occurs to me I need a better poetry icon. :)

***

The Persistence of History

Like most of you,
I desperately wanted a culture that wasn't mine.
There was nothing interesting
in the old spirituals and tales of struggle
endured by my parent's generation,
nothing profound in the garbage
that littered the streets of my neighborhood
blasting bass into the night
in a never-ending turf war with the crickets.
This was not home for me. Never had been.

But unlike you,
my options for co-opting were limited.
I could not disguise my hair or my nose or my lips
I couldn't hide other cultures in my skin
I couldn't pass off the songs I heard on holidays as my ancestry
but I tried.
I told people that my forebears were Mongols
who somehow learned to cross the equator
and ended up in an arid land, eating insects and getting water
from songs that live under the ground.
People found this improbable;
they could see the lines of entirely different continents
chiseled into me, they knew what I was running from.
I only stopped when I knew they wouldn't let me get anywhere with it,

but to this day, when I hear
the muffled beats of my East coast memory
driving down the street
I have to sit down
and imagine
that they were just strangers shouting their identities
to anyone who would listen
instead of my brothers chasing me down,
calling me home.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Crappy Repetitive Top 40 Radio

I've just finished reading Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, the debut collection of short stories from ZZ Packer. It's a really excellent set of fiction, with mostly young black folks, poor and naive, traveling to some other place and having these enormous, conflicting experiences that changes something fundamental in them. Then, somehow, they must take their realizations back and not integrate them in themselves, but very probably into the community around them.

What's great about these stories is while there's a strong connective thread of race and class, that's not the focus. The background of these characters remains just that, and while it informs what they say, how they think (how could it not?), it doesn't necessarily feel like you're just reading a bunch of stories about po' Negroes and their Earthly troubles. Alienation, familial obligation, the dissonance between thought and reality, all of it is in there, living and breathing, under the trappings of Pentecostal churches and blasted neighborhoods with boarded-up homes.

Packer has a tremendous grasp on language and dialogue that makes me envious. Her characters speak and I'm immediately transported back to my childhood in the heart of Baltimore City, hearing ten year old girls using words they've yet to grow into and doing all the things I've always thought of as distinctly black: rolling their eyes, sucking their teeth, frying their hair until it can be plastered to their skulls in crispy, wavy strips. She knows this world intimately, and while she's certainly in a different place these days (she lives in Pacifica, CA of all places) her memories are firmly rooted to her formative experiences. From her writing it seems that she wasn't the most comfortable with her childhood environment but she's learned to love it, because it's hers. There's a lesson in there for me, I know.

As soon as I finished with the last story in the set, "Doris Is Coming," I immediately started doing a bit of research on her. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere has made a lot of noise in the literary world, becoming a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, being personally selected by John Updike for the Today Book Club, earning rapturous reviews in O Magazine and from Zadie Smith, whom she's frequently compared to. I can totally see why. :) (Note to self: Read White Teeth.)

The greatest find, though, is this essay on America and religion, which I couldn't agree more with. While there's been an understandable uptick in adherents to aggressive atheism ("It's not OK to just disagree with religion any more, it must be purged from society if we expect to survive."), I'm not sure the current tack of the liberal movement in America is one that's destined to work. Like it or not, religion isn't something that people will wake up one day and realize they don't need. It's been here since we've learned to think in abstractions and it'll continue to endure to the last man. A sense of mysticism has been hard-wired into our brains, and while it's true that it can be expressed through science, reason and logic, it's simply not something everyone will flock to. If we're really going to be effective in tackling the religious and moral quantities that have popped up in politics, we're going to need to speak the language of the people who really view them as important, even if we don't believe them.

I'm really excited that she's coming to San Jose State sometime next year. :)

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: Santa Clara, CA
Current Music: Humor of the Situation - Barenaked Ladies

I'm trying to get better about posting, I really am! But there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of time, alas. The time has perhaps come to download an LJ client to my laptop and PC, so I can type a little here or there.

Thanks for everyone's input about the bank thing! I ended up getting an account with Valley Credit Union, and they've been pretty good so far. Waiting on my checks so I can finally catch up on a few bills that are late (mostly because there's no way to pay them without a book of checks), but by the end of November I should be mostly caught up on everything and ready for Christmas shopping! Hopefully, people don't mind books, CDs and DVDs. ;)

Sunday Tube and I saw The Wild (he'll say at my request, but I will categorically deny it). It actually wasn't *terrible*, though there was a lot that was painful to watch. I'll save further comment for later review type stuff. :)

Monday was the writer's group; we watched Chicago come back from 20 points down to beat Arizona by 1 near the end of the fourth quarter. It was...impressive; I do believe the Bears are for real this season. Hopefully they won't collapse in December or anything, we'll keep our fingers crossed.

Anyway, didn't get to finish my short story on time for submitting, so I went with a few poems that fit the new fable theme instead. Most folks don't read poetry there, so again...apologies for forcing it on you. This buys me a bit of time, though, to figure out what the hell is wrong with me!

It comes down to this: I keep forgetting perspective about my writing. I'm 26 years old, and most of the people I know are a bit older than that, and have way more experience with writing short stories besides. Truth be told, I've only managed to finish three of them in my life, and I have no technique or training for it. It's going to be slow, and my stories are going to be bad. Eventually, I'll get better. I'm just not there now.

Doesn't really stop me from wanting to write like everyone else in the group. The level of quality is fairly high, and I consider myself fortunate to be in such company. It's just difficult to lower my expectations for myself right now. I'm not going to be happy with much that I write prose-wise, and perhaps I shouldn't be. I'm a novice in every sense of the word.

Tuesday we went to see a musical called Dessa Rose. It was bad. It's about the power of finding sisterhood in the pre-Civil War South. The message and plot are worthwhile, I suppose, though the material has been very thoroughly mined already. What really made the play stand out in its awfulness is the sanitized way it handled almost everything negative. Slavery came off like a mild inconvenience to most black folks, and a lot of the really bad stuff (there was a lashing, vaginal mutilation, and attempted rape, not to mention all kinds of other dehumanizing situations) was stylized away to the point of minimal impact. For all the crowing the two main characters did about the 'struggle they went through' at the beginning and end, there wasn't a real sense of struggle at all. Just stuff that happened to make Dessa tart and uppity.

This, in my opinion, does a really big disservice to the reality of what happened to black people during slavery times. If you're going to talk about it, then talk about it...don't clean it up so it doesn't offend delicate sensibilities. People, even folks who pay $30+ for tickets to a good-time musical, need to be exposed to this, need to have a proper sense of what transgressed in this country 140 years ago. I'm not saying that art should be confrontational for the sake of confrontation, but we shouldn't wrap anything harsh in spun sugar to make it go down easier. The way Dessa Rose described slavery was akin to describing rape as an "unpleasant sexual activity." Technically it's true, but it doesn't even begin to cover it.

Because anything negative was treated with kid gloves, the story about reconciliation between slave girl Dessa and lonely plantation owner Ruth came off as horribly cliched and oversimplified. The big "Hey we're all the same!" number is called (and I wish I was kidding) "White Milk, Red Blood," expressing that no matter what color a nursing mother may be, she always leaks the same kind of bodily fluids.

The whole play was preachy, treacly, and a little insulting. And I'm not just ripping it apart because I missed Peter Beagle to see it. It really was bad. :) The actors sold the material for all it was worth, though, and they did a pretty good job. They worked hard and should definitely be recognized for it.

Speaking of Peter Beagle,

toob was nice enough to miss a lot of stuff so we could go to Berkeley and watch him speak. He read "A Dance for Emilie" from his new collection, and took a few questions from the audience. Apparently, he lives in Oakland! I am SO sending him fan mail. :D :D He was very personable and warm, and his delivery style was taken right out of vaudeville and a few notable Jewish comics. I liked him a lot!

That takes us all the way to today. I'm hoping to keep going on the short story, knock a few character descriptions out of the way, and start preparing my Christmas list for all the folks back home in Arkansas. Miss you guys. :)

There's a lot going on in national and world news, besides...Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act, pretty much making torture legal (or at least impossible to do anything about) and just widening the memory hole that 'enemy combatants' find themselves placed into. At this point, I'm almost numb to the state of the Union; I can only hope and pray that enough people see what's going on to give Dems control of Congress in '06. It's not a permanent solution by any stretch, but it at least stems the flood of sanity that's been pouring out of this country's political scene for six years now. Honestly, it's just...discouraging. I feel pretty helpless in the face of it all. I thought I could trust the voting process, at least, but what with the rise of the Diebold machines even that's suspect. What can we do? There's all kinds of groups to join, money to throw at political action groups, charities to donate to...but none of that seems to be doing any good. People are still rabidly ignorant, uncompassionate, hostile to anyone's opinion but the ones spouted at them by television and radio. What can you do with that? It feels like our political process, our way of life, our civilization is at a breaking point. I don't mean this in an alarmist sense, but something fundamental has to change about America if we're going to get to a place that's any less broken than it is now. That's the long and short of it. I don't think the Human Rights Council or any PIRG or lobby group is going to be the source of this change, either. Whatever happens, it'll be unorganized and spontaneous. All I can do is hope it's positive.

Last, but not least, happy birthday to the suddenly disappeared

sugerhound! If you're reading this, hope you're doing fantastically. :)

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Rebel Prince - Rufus Wainwright (internal)

There's this song, you see, by Rufus Wainwright, called "Rebel Prince." In it, he sings part of the chorus in French and by God it's the sexiest thing ever. There's just something about that silky, slightly slurred voice hitting those notes with words that...inexplicably sound good. Man. It's been running through my head all day.

*stares and drools at his otter*

I haven't been writing very much here, mainly because I never seem to have the time to sit and try to spin my activities in a properly introspective light. I've been living what I tend to call, perhaps unfairly, 'the shallow life.' You know, work, watching movies, socializing, hanging out and all of that without any real...examination of who I am, what I'm doing, where I'm going, etc. etc. This really isn't a bad thing, as the little tag I've given for it would seem to indicate. Sometimes you need a break from all the thinking to just take the time to enjoy things. Which is what I've been aiming to do. By and large, I've been succeeding.

daroneasa let me petsit her new rabbit, Niuk, last weekend while she was out of town to do a family thing. It was my first experience ever...having a pet while I was on my own, and my attitude towards them have changed considerably. Well, maybe it was just the species bias. :) There's just something transformative about having something so helpless and dependent on you under your care; you learn the depths of your gentleness, patience and love. There's the fine art of discipline, the overwhelming desire to spoil with treats and petting, the need to be with this tiny little thing all the time to protect it, to make sure every need is attended to, to know that it's never lonely. I wouldn't have thought I had it in me to be endlessly loving, at least I didn't until a few people showed me what it was like. I think, emotionally, I'm ready to be a father. Now I just have to wait for the rest of society and my finances to catch up with me. :)

This is all...a bit much to extrapolate from merely taking care of a rabbit for three days, and I'm not sure I'd really cut the mustard as a parent. But I know the love is there, the boundless, endless love. I'm surprised by it, but in some ways I'm really not. ;) It's always been there, just...I've never been able to express it quite as readily, through various neuroses of my own. I've gotten better about that, and I think I'll only continue to get better. Next stop: making sure that my friends know this.

The move is coming closer and closer. January seems like two weeks ago, and already we're sneaking up on April; July and August are going to be here before I even know it. This is such a huge step, and because, I guess, I know that I'm going to be taking it I've been worrying about it night and day all year. Only...it's too early to finalize everything, or to even make the first tentative steps towards being out there...so there's nothing I can do except put myself in a good position for when the time comes, which is something I'm working on.

toob and I got into a fight about the rabbit, actually (I wanted to keep him, he said it's a bad idea), and from that I think we've gotten onto the same page about a lot of things. I need to work on...how to be properly angry, I guess, so that communication doesn't break down. Once that starts to go...

I love

toob with all of my heart. :)

Let's see...Matt's Changeling game started Tuesday evening. I haven't touched the setting in quite some time, and I forgot how...deceptively simple the setting is. The concepts are very esoteric, so you can dash off explanations fairly quickly, but when you *really* start to think about them, things get pretty hairy and bogged down with all kinds of rules calls. I think the game is best played loosely, so that rules can change and shift to fit the needs of the story and character development. You need a really capable Storyteller and really mature players, though, to do that, and even then it's not going to work always. Of the games, I think, Changeling is the most subjective; it's never *about* the same thing between any two or three people. And because the nature of its make-believe allows for such an incredibly wide spectrum of concepts, it's hard to get everyone to play nice under one roof. Possible, but difficult. I think Tuesday night was the best example of this ever. :)

My character is a rabbit pooka named Rochester Runcible Shaw. I've gotten fairly attached to him already, but I don't think I'll get to do as much with him as I'd like. The game is huge (6 players) and short (4 hours), so I'm not sure how...involved everything is going to be. Either way, it's a pretty fun ride and I get to be a class clown, which is one of my (not-so) secret desires.

Oh! I've lost 18 pounds in the past three months, hooray for me! I'm down to about 152 - 155 pounds, depending on how much fat I've eaten, and I don't feel quite so 'svelte' as that. ;) I think it's because I need to do more exercise, honestly; my stomach has gotten considerably smaller, but there's a noticeable paunch. I'd like to be flat and toned (the last time I could see my abs was high school...never lost those 'freshman 15' from college), so I'm going to work towards that. My ultimate goal, health-wise, is to be able to bike to work and back without killing myself by the time I'm Californy-bound.

It's occured to me that when friends of mine say 'I don't think of you as black,' I really should be taking that as an insult. Before, I've been thinking of it as a slightly misguided, left-handed compliment, but the racism implied in the statement has gotten a bit too strong to ignore. The idea is that blacks have some kind of stereotypical behavior concurrent with rap/hip-hop culture; slurred words, ghetto-speak, trendy, improperly worn clothes, thumping bass and bling. Because I don't buy into the culture, I've somehow risen 'above' the base desires of my race to a sort of transcendence that seperates me from the typical inferiority that black people tend to be plagued by. I speak so well. I dress like I've got some sense. I don't throw my race in people's faces in any obvious way. I'm unthreatening and non-confrontational, like Bill Cosby in the 80s or Wayne Brady today. I'm not quite sure what to do with this sentiment my friends seem to have of stereotyping my race and my supposed climb from the crackdens to proper...er, whiteness, I guess, but I'm not going to start going all Marcus Garvey over it. :)

Still, I'm black and I'm proud. And people need to lay off the 'black people suck but you're one of the cool ones' bit.

I saw "American History X" again last night, and there's been a bit of fallout from it. ;)

Anyway, I would say more, but I'm at work and I really should be shelving some books or something. :)

Profile

jakebe

Boomer Express

July 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Style Credit

Base style: Compartmentalize by timeasmymeasure
Theme: Almost Royal by krja

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Aug. 12th, 2025 07:22 pm

The Writing Desk of Jakebe Rabbit

A collection of words and fluff

Entries tagged with race

Climbing Out of the Valley

NaPoeWriMo, Day 6

Christian is the New Black

The Week In Brief

Dans les matins