On Books and Homeliness

For a lot of people, home is place. It is the house they grew up in on the street where they played in the city that was too fast, too slow, or just right. But for me, home is people. Being the daughter of an Air Force veteran, I’m quite used to moving around and feeling ungrounded, placing my roots in people rather than cities. So when my parents decided to move back to the West Coast, that’s where my home shifted.

I can’t (and don’t) call California home in the way most people do. I didn’t come of age here. I didn’t go to prom here or do any of the things that people associate with home on reminiscent sighs. So I find it odd how comfortable I feel in what is still to me an unfamiliar house with furniture vastly different from what I crawled all over as a child, on a street that is too hot to play in, in a city where I don’t know the roads.

As I write this, irrationally awake while exhaustion tugs on my eyes, I realize that home is also that place where you deposit the things that most matter to you. Those things that you can’t depart with as you shift from house to apartment to townhome to house and back again. Those things that always manage to make it into a duffel bag or a box or a backpack. Those are what make home, home.

So why am I so at ease here? More at ease, even, on this visit than I’ve been in the past? The question pulled at me all day yesterday until I realized that after 4 years of being in this house – my mother finally unpacked her books. When I dropped my bags in the guest bedroom, I was immediately transported back to all those places and all those “homes” that had books for days – our own little library. I did yesterday what I’ve done so many times in the past – I roamed. I dragged my fingers over the spines, I pulled out what I wanted to “check out,” I chuckled as I came across duplicates of titles (evidence that while you can never have too many books, you can have so many that you forget what you’ve already purchased).

Nothing is in order on these shelves, but everything has its place. When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost is nestled in between Race Matters and The Mis-education of the Negro. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower snuggles up to Langston Hughes’ The Return of Simple. E. Lynn Harris makes his appearance here and there in a bevy of self-help books, mental health tomes, and philosophical reflections on race and gender relations in the United States.

How much of my current pursuit – fiction author and “serious” academic scholar – were inspired by this library? How much of my current politics? In this space, the idea that I could be both is no longer abstract.

These are the books of my childhood. These are the books of that ever out of reach “home” that we can never get back to. They represent an idea of place to me. A grounding. Roots that I didn’t know I had. And I am comforted by them in a way that I didn’t realize I needed.

On Silence

I’ve been away from this space for quite some time. But I was reminded of my old blog yesterday (on Blogspot, of all places), one in which I wrote about race, feminism, culture, and so much more. Things that made me who I am today. Re-reading some of my old posts made me think about how much graduate school has silenced me, and how I’ve let it silence me.

I stopped writing on my old blog a few days after Jonathan Ferrell was murdered in Charlotte, NC – a month or so into the first term of my second experience with graduate school. I told myself I no longer had the time to dedicate to the space – but I think that part of me was tired and another part of me was scared. I’d been blogging about my experiences as a Black woman, as a Black student, as a massive consumer of television and movies regularly for 2 or so years by that point. And I think maybe the act of writing in private made me bolder in person. And maybe that boldness slowly become an unconscious burden. I don’t really know.

In any case, here it is 2015, almost exactly 2 years since I last wrote in a public forum. An article from Conditionally Accepted, entitled “On the Conservatizing Effect of the Tenure-Track” (by Dr. Eric Anthony Grollman), flits across the Twitter TL and perfectly captures why I’ve allowed myself to be silenced. This, on the same day that I am reminded of my old blog. I take it as a sign that I need to start writing again.

He writes:

“I wish I could say that I didn’t fall into the trap of fearful conformity.  I came in like a lion, roaring that I would only do the tenure-track my way. But, right on cue, I became a meek lamb, obsessing over self-presentation, avoiding certain forms of service and advocacy that I deemed too political or radical, and fighting so hard to stay visible and relevant to my discipline.”

I told myself the same thing of my current graduate program. I would be me. I would be vocal. I would not let graduate school change me. This was on the heels of having relationships with “liberal-minded” people silently severed because I was “that girl.” You know, that angry Black girl that spends “too much” time talking about women and race and why can’t she just get over it anyway – slavery ended in 1860-something or another and women can work now and stuff.

So I went to class, I went to work, I came home, I read, I did my assignments, and I started all over again the next day. I wore the right clothes. I didn’t dye my hair the color I wanted. I let people say foolish things to me under the guise of not being too political. I stopped challenging people to consider their blind spots. I changed in ways that I am only just able to articulate and enumerate.

It has been…stifling. And I lost something of myself. I lost my writing. But what hurts more is that I also gave it up. It’s difficult to contend with the fact that I have been complicit in my own silencing.

So I’m going to reclaim the best parts of who I was, and do this last year of this MA program a bit differently. Maybe who I am on the page will make me more fully who I am in person.

Originally posted on Tumblr on 09/02/2015