walking home

Today I had I really great conversation with the mama of the baby I watch for work. She's writing her dissertation on representations of black female sexuality in cinema.

She provided for me, without having realized it, or at least not letting me in on it if she did, something I've been greatly needing lately, and that's a sense of direction and a pair of open arms.

Sometimes I wonder if the easier path would be better for me over all. I mostly just wonder that when I look at people I used to know. So many of them are living these lives that are, to some degree really appealing, if only for their comfort level. To be the prototypical upwardly-mobile black girl at college, with not a hair out of place or ever letting one's leg hair get long enough to notice, it'd be a lot easier in someways. To force down the parts of me that don't line up with convention, or to ignore the things that I think about, the ones that keep me up at night because they're burning for a voice. I give those things voice, because I've never been able not to notice them. I just got a vocabulary for the voice to speak with in the last couple of years. But when I didn't know the words it was so much easier to keep it quiet.

I wonder if all of the projects, both internal and external, are even worth it. I wonder frankly if I just try to do these things because I can see holes, and wiring, and marionette strings, but can't quite figure out how to make it stop, this system that I see ruining everyone that I love. So I do what I can, in the name of exposing the gears and churning cranks, but maybe I only do it so I can sleep at night.

bell hooks has this bit in "Yearning" where she talks about black folks who are at the margins not only of mainstream white consciousness, but mainstream black consciousness. Those who are committed to explicitly anti-capitalist projects, and don't equate black self-actualization with black capitalism, and are not afraid of losing their "blackness" by consuming all types of cultures. She brings in this awesome quote by Paulo Friere (that I'm gonna butcher) that says that we can begin as objects to then reenter as subjects. All of these projects are an attempt to steak out subjectivity in a culture and society that writes me out as the object, essentially by definition.