“I think that black people have been conditioned for so long … to only look at the level of representation — are we visible? — that there was an inordinate pressure that that visibility is positive. I hope that we’re getting closer to black people being able to engage their image of themselves as art, which means complication, which means you do some good stuff and you do some bad stuff because that is what it is to be human. …
You need the variety, Steve, you need it. We exist in the middle: We’re not demons or angels — we’re human beings. And so that is what needs to be reflected in the art of our nation.
Today’s Morning Edition on NPR was an interview with novelist and television screenwriter Attica Locke about representation in the African American characters she writes. She was talking about the challenges of writing characters who stand in for the many – which it seems happens often. People look at one person of color – or one gay person, or one Jewish person, or one autistic person — and that one person is EVERYONE – every female person of color, every male Jew, every differently-abled child, every gay woman that person has ever experienced or encountered… which is why, when I was growing up, it was hard to hear so many times that “people are looking to you, looking at you, people are watching, people see you…” because it felt like I was responsible for how and what people thought, and who can grow up straight under that kind of pressure? Many are the crooked trees.
Yet, a bent twig can be a positive thing – at least that’s what second generation graduates of Mills College are called. Bent twigs, based on the aphorism, ‘’Tis education forms the common mind, Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.’ according to Alexander Pope’s Epistles to Several Persons (1732). If the twig is going to bend anyway – and it will, we have an insistently pushy world – the best we can do is shape it strongly.
These poems are for the nephews, five and seven now, flexible little twiglets stretching up in a windy world with acid rain and thin soil
sans leaves, still lovely
a solo sapling
savoring its solitude
shows silent splendor
dig your roots in
bend in the wind, but
don’t rustle for every breeze
sink deep and grow straight
branch out
crowned head and shoulders
above the crowd, you will be
noticed. stretch taller
competing with yourself
regardless how tall
looking up shows you new heights
aim high. race mountains.
