Birthday Dinner
Originally uploaded by Zanalee
My dad took me to Chez Lucienne's for Grilled Salmon this week. It was soooo good! That's it. That's all I wanted say. I am really enjoying this long weekend.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Friday, May 28, 2010
Journal Journies
"The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint."
-Georgia Okeefe
When I was in high school and in the early part of my college career, I wrote the most poetry I have ever written in my life so far. I lived in my mind and was not aware of it really. I didn't have much cause to climb down from my islolated and introspective little cloud at the time. There were things I observed about myself and about the world which I could only convey in a kind of code and that code streamed from me on a daily basis. I believed in it. But like many things, that well dried up somewhere around my mid twenties, and with the advent of internet and the need to share ideas with the faceless masses, the expression of writing in me had turned itself outwards to an audience, most of whom no blogger will ever meet.
I have decided to start writing in a journal again recently. Even though my handwriting is horribly more psychotic than ever, I feel that I have to get back to a certain place again that does not exist online. More than ever I need to write from a gut level, no matter what comes out or how. I just feel the need these days. The years when I lived life just to write about it, when I believed my journal was a living, breathing thing and amassed two boxes of such testament as raw, disturbing, embarrassing and touching an expose as anything you might find on the shelves of a bookstore are more than likely over. My good friend Noel, who has known me for over twenty years was right when he told me last week that we are different people now. I am different. How surreal time is.
-Georgia Okeefe
When I was in high school and in the early part of my college career, I wrote the most poetry I have ever written in my life so far. I lived in my mind and was not aware of it really. I didn't have much cause to climb down from my islolated and introspective little cloud at the time. There were things I observed about myself and about the world which I could only convey in a kind of code and that code streamed from me on a daily basis. I believed in it. But like many things, that well dried up somewhere around my mid twenties, and with the advent of internet and the need to share ideas with the faceless masses, the expression of writing in me had turned itself outwards to an audience, most of whom no blogger will ever meet.
I have decided to start writing in a journal again recently. Even though my handwriting is horribly more psychotic than ever, I feel that I have to get back to a certain place again that does not exist online. More than ever I need to write from a gut level, no matter what comes out or how. I just feel the need these days. The years when I lived life just to write about it, when I believed my journal was a living, breathing thing and amassed two boxes of such testament as raw, disturbing, embarrassing and touching an expose as anything you might find on the shelves of a bookstore are more than likely over. My good friend Noel, who has known me for over twenty years was right when he told me last week that we are different people now. I am different. How surreal time is.
Monday, May 17, 2010
"All we did is to modify the old trap"
"Where did we go wrong educationally? After the Civil War, the period called reconstruction, a period of pseudo-democracy, we began to have our own institutions, our own schools.We had no role model for a school, ... our own role model. So we began to imitate White schools.
Our church was an imitation of the White church. All we did is to modify the old trap. We didn't change the images, we became more comfortable within the trap. We didn't change the images, we changed some of the concepts of the images, but the images remained the same. So the mis-education that gave us a slave mentality had been altered. But it remained basically the same."
-John Henrik Clarke
Global Black Presence
For the first time in my life after seeing a play called "The People of Clarendon County"with my Mass Media in Black America class last month, I now feel that integration in schools at the time that it occurred in Black History was probably a bad idea. I don't believe that the very act of integration was a bad idea, but that at this time, the need for blacks to be integrated with whites was just an unconscious reinforcement of the idea that we were still worth nothing if we couldn't learn what they were learning, and be where they were.
The messed up thing is that once we were robbed of our culture, and religion and then set "free" all that was left for us to learn were lies, lies about ourselves, our God concepts and our worth. "Freedom" meant being free to learn these lies without the the threat of death, intimidation and discrimination and lets face it, that war has never really been fully won. Anytime the black community has tried to build or develop an economic base (Black Wall Street ) of it's own or a school of it's own, or a community of it's own, the white power structure finds a way to dissolve it, destroy it, deplete it's resources or simple deny it's necessity and therefore deny financial backing.
Churches, they have no problem with letting us have because religion and our God concept was the first thing that was completely and successfully tainted and striped away from our culture and replaced with their own to the point where we have no knowledge of any other God but the one brought to us by missionaries many hundreds of years ago.
So I suppose ultimately, we had no choice but to be absorbed into all this mess. But to me the answer still remains and has to be, a sense of our own worth through re-education about a history that we still have to dig deep and ask questions and do endless research to unearth the way anthropologists plunder and excavate foreign soil. You know, because otherwise it's like having a discussion with someone thinking you have something to bring to the table that's not even yours. That's not a real discussion, never has been, never will be.
Our church was an imitation of the White church. All we did is to modify the old trap. We didn't change the images, we became more comfortable within the trap. We didn't change the images, we changed some of the concepts of the images, but the images remained the same. So the mis-education that gave us a slave mentality had been altered. But it remained basically the same."
-John Henrik Clarke
Global Black Presence
For the first time in my life after seeing a play called "The People of Clarendon County"with my Mass Media in Black America class last month, I now feel that integration in schools at the time that it occurred in Black History was probably a bad idea. I don't believe that the very act of integration was a bad idea, but that at this time, the need for blacks to be integrated with whites was just an unconscious reinforcement of the idea that we were still worth nothing if we couldn't learn what they were learning, and be where they were.
The messed up thing is that once we were robbed of our culture, and religion and then set "free" all that was left for us to learn were lies, lies about ourselves, our God concepts and our worth. "Freedom" meant being free to learn these lies without the the threat of death, intimidation and discrimination and lets face it, that war has never really been fully won. Anytime the black community has tried to build or develop an economic base (Black Wall Street ) of it's own or a school of it's own, or a community of it's own, the white power structure finds a way to dissolve it, destroy it, deplete it's resources or simple deny it's necessity and therefore deny financial backing.
Churches, they have no problem with letting us have because religion and our God concept was the first thing that was completely and successfully tainted and striped away from our culture and replaced with their own to the point where we have no knowledge of any other God but the one brought to us by missionaries many hundreds of years ago.
So I suppose ultimately, we had no choice but to be absorbed into all this mess. But to me the answer still remains and has to be, a sense of our own worth through re-education about a history that we still have to dig deep and ask questions and do endless research to unearth the way anthropologists plunder and excavate foreign soil. You know, because otherwise it's like having a discussion with someone thinking you have something to bring to the table that's not even yours. That's not a real discussion, never has been, never will be.
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