Writ(h)ing at Columbia University

It’s getting harder to write. The pressure continues to mount and as it turns out, every time I turn in something well-liked, it has to be even better the next time. It’s the first semester. I have things going into school that I was already working on and need more guidance. I bring them in, it goes well, I start wondering if my best writing was before I arrived and has left me when it starts to count in a different way.

I still get air when I write in my journal. I’ve noticed a dramatic change in my writing there, but only there. A week ago, I sank my flesh into it, the first time writing in it since moving to NY. All the beautiful words I couldn’t figure out how to get on the page flowed without shame. I could admit to everything. I could stop lying. In fact, I could admit that I was lying all the time. I reveal only slivers of me to everyone, depending on how they look at me, depending on when they dig deep into my eyes as we talk and when not. It tells me so much. Where are their thoughts, I ask myself. When in class, I find myself staring at the quietest students in the room. I have physical joy in my body when they speak.

There are different people. When one Jewish person discusses the work they are doing to archive the Holocaust and memorialize those stories as a way of understanding a Palestinian whose family line is likely stopped and their anxiousness to preserve it, there is a neglect of acknowledging that the Holocaust preceded Palestinians being forced off their land and now, occupied, have lost generations of family lines. It can’t be discussed. So much of what we implore of the world in our writing is too sensitive to do. It is. It really is. I don’t want to sit in a class, the only Black person among 19, discussing a poem where the author writes about Susan Smith, a white woman who killed her kids and then told the police it was a Black man. I don’t want to sit in that class where there is an uproar over the difference in the terms “cop” and “police”, everyone wailing back and forth because the energy has built into a freneticism, but then they are dead I mean in the grave when discussing this poem. No one has thoughts on what the Black man wrote about the Black man imagined. They do about Gertrude Stein writing about nouns being boring, adjectives hideous, commas, questions marks, and exclamation points ridiculous, verbs and adverbs glorious, periods as gods. But not about what the Black man wrote about the Black man imagined.

I just don’t want to. But I’ve done it before. In orchestra. In the LDS church. At school. I went to church, the LDS church, my first Sunday in NY. They can help me. With food and clothes. Finding a place to stay when I have to move out of housing. I had fun. Every moment of it–until–While leaving, there were three men in master’s programs. Business, dentistry, something else. They were locked in. I stopped to say goodbye, I called them Columbia as a group. They didn’t much turn. They didn’t hear me. I walk up to the group, “Bye…” I ask again their names and repeat them. They half, weird, quietly respond to the farewell. Everything was perfect and in the last tiny moment before leaving, I remembered what this would really be. Not intentionally, but by default. I know it so well.

I’m trying to move around. International friends, Black friends, BIPOC group, LGBTQ group, Columbia Journal–I’m doing it, I really am.

Struggle Truth

Social media is social media. Sometimes the pictures and announcements portray the truth of our happiness, joy, and hope. Other times, the pictures and announcements are to create what we wish the truth to be. It’s not always a malicious endeavor. We hope. We hope for…

Part of my writing journey is to share the truth that I would certainly want to hide. It’s scary. Downright terrifying. But it’s also liberating. I don’t need anyone to read any of what I have shared, but I know—and am released because of it—that I’ve said a truth. Any truth. Because every time I post good news, great news, I feel the importance of also saying, “This isn’t all of it. There’s more.” It doesn’t mean I’m wallowing in pain. Maybe I am, but maybe I’m just showing that pain and joy can coexist.

I’ve had this blog for over a decade. I’ve shared during my worst of human experience thus far. And my hope, my hope is…that it remains the worst, that it will only get better from here. Or there. The “there” that was mental illness, substance abuse, unemployment, isolation, and abandonment.

Yet it is better. I just got hired by the New York Times. They got in touch to say they’ve read my writing and want to know if I’m NY. I’m not. Yet I’m moving there in August to start a writing degree at Columbia University. And my honest truth: I may not finish it. The way I struggle, it may be one more unfinished ventures that I have too many of to count.

It is no coincidence. I’ve agonized in prayer for five years over getting into a graduate school program with money to pay for it. I’ve already turned down offers that came with no scholarship. Over the years that I prayed, I acknowledged that if I got into a graduate school program without any money to finance it, it didn’t come from God. I withdrew from offers in agony to honor that it wasn’t from God. It wouldn’t be an answer to the prayers I’ve cried out of my mouth and out of my heart after years of a broken career path punctuated by struggle.

Now that it comes, now that I have a scholarship, now that the NYT has hired me with the question of “do I live in NY?” I can rejoice. Yet my rejoicing doesn’t change the heartbreak and turmoil that I face with the very diagnosis that stalled my life, made it into a dry dust swirling through the desert with nowhere to go and no origin to identify where it came from.

It still hurts. I still hurt. And I write this to say:

No matter what social media tells you, people are still hurting. Some people are hurting so much that they lie on social media just to envision what life could be if only they had the ability to live it.

The truth of the matter is that truth often becomes what people want the truth to be—not what it really is.

Pyramid Schema

While stepping off the stage, I could only feel disappointment. That note–that one very loud and very wrong note right at the top of the pyramid–robbing me of all performance pleasure, ensuring that I hear no praise of admiration, no smiles and nods of approval, paralyzing my senses.

Then she rushes up to me with an unnecessary urgency (because I’m not really going anywhere) and exclaims how appropriately I have performed Bach, saying it was “just right,” how certain phrases were played “exactly as they were supposed to be played”.

“Thank you, thank you very much, thank you”, is all I can numbly repeat as she bombards my space with compliments that were only partly for me. All the while, I simply want to ask, “Who the hell is Bach?”

I don’t know who this man is. I never met him. I certainly don’t understand what I’ve heard about him. A lot of facts and dates that don’t amount to me talking with the man, seeing how he would hem and haw between thoughts or observing what would capture him in a long gaze. Something beautiful, perhaps? In its physicality? Or in its meaning? I wouldn’t know. Why, then, would I be able to play anything he composed the way it was supposed to be played…exactly…right?

My emotional interpretation of this music is overdone. Bach’s prowess for dismantling a chord progression, even just one scale, creates a mesmerizing, addicting irony. Seven notes that cannot be broken down are cracked into dozens of pieces, and then stacked into layers. The layers I unfold in performance aren’t symbiotic with Bach, nor symbolic of him, which makes it personal for me. She didn’t see me though.

I am weary of our idolization of artists, the divinity that we imbue on those who capture emotional expression and spectacularly funnel it through an artistic medium. We’re given an opportunity to experience a moment in time, complete with the emotional, mental, and physical implications of the world in which it was created, through the lens of the body that created it. Then we liken that creation to the artist and declare him creator. Not artist–but creator. Bach didn’t create the sounds that are organized into music, the human mechanisms that allow us to hear it in a myriad of ways, the scales, instruments, or even the wood that is used to make the instruments.

And so she credits Bach with the creation of my performance, of my emotive interpretation, of my climax and denouement, of me.

Bach established the schema, yes, but not the pyramid.

Viva la Revolucion~Part I

I want to map a revolution. Although I was not yet conscious of it, I began mapping this revolution in fourth grade by playing a musical instrument: percussion. When I began, I had no idea that I would neither meet, nor personally play with any black women percussionists. Nor was I aware that there were no black women in any major symphony orchestras across the nation. By entering into a field that many blacks, especially black women, are not a part of, I found myself carving a new path for others. Throughout the duration of high school and my first two years at the Manhattan School of Music, I had one aim: to play in a major symphony orchestra. The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, through their Talent Development Program—a program specifically structured to train minority musicians in order to boost representation of Blacks and Latinos in major symphony orchestras around the world—provided me with a rigorous and unforgiving program; unforgiving because when I made the decision to transfer from the conservatory in New York to Spelman College in 2008, eight years of closely guided nurturing and support suddenly vanished into thin air. The principal percussionist of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra—my teacher, my mentor, my friend, my confidant, my muse, my parent—immediately severed all communication with me. Even my family and some close family friends displayed overwhelming disappointment. I was alone. Or I felt alone. The only black woman in my incoming class at the Manhattan School of Music, I already felt the struggle to fully realize the intersection of my musical and personal direction amongst souls who had no experiences comparable or relatable to my own. But after moving back to Atlanta, New York’s singular and taxing journey waxed fairer in comparison. Musically excommunicated from a network that I personally crafted over several relentless years, I felt discouraged to even continue pursuing what I know I was sent to this earth to do.

After soloing with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra at age 15, I belonged (or so I thought). My obvious differences from those around me, mainly white men, seemed to no longer alienate me. The young white boys who I played with in the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra, the World Youth Symphony Orchestra, and in various other ensembles, who never hid their disdain for me as a black, female section leader suddenly feigned respect and even forged inclusion. And while I still faced unwarranted hostility, most likely derived from their usual sense of elitism, my talent and abilities could no longer be doubted or denied. But it was not until I sat in a concert given by the principal percussionist of the ASO just a few months ago that I realized how much I never was or could be “one of them.”

Sitting at the concert, watching him live his life right before my eyes, I found myself choking for air. I felt so anxious I could not sit still. I paced back and forth in the back of the room trying to pacify my emotions in an attempt to absorb and partake in the music and the musicianship fertilizing before me. But no matter how hard I tried I could not swallow the hurt and the pain, the dismissal and the betrayal, the callousness and the coldness of my teacher’s heart—the same heart that, once upon a time, provided me with so much warmth, encouragement and acceptance. During this private panic attack, it dawned on me: I was a thing; a pet. It was something I remember hearing my mother say, but could not bring myself to understand what it meant until I lived through it. “White people will sometimes adopt black people as pets, sort of like a project that may or may not be more for their own benefits than for yours,” was something like what my mother said. The conversation being had I do not recall, but her statement rung in my ears until its meaning was realized as a lived experience. My most sensitive asset became a mark for exploitation. All over the nation my teacher was well known by the most accomplished and influential percussionists largely because I travelled extensively, studying with and playing for his colleagues. As a black female amidst hundreds of white, mostly male students, I could not be forgotten. My teacher became somewhat of an icon as he reared up an achieved and well-known young, black and woman percussionist. As I increasingly embodied the musician that my teacher envisioned crafting, I became less and less a human being until I merely resembled a product in a thriving market. And with my most sensitive assets up for sale, my womanhood and my blackness became his most valuable exploit.

As I map my revolution and forge a miraculous evolution, I not only remember, but I cherish who I am and vow never to sacrifice my personhood again. The crushing nature of patriarchy, supremacy, capitalism, racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and every other diabolical force exists in all (dimly lit) corners of existence, music not excluded. My revolution in and of itself is a spotlight; exposing, questioning, confronting, scrutinizing, ostracizing, and ultimately eradicating the evils of the orchestral world and beyond.

I accomplish my truth by creating, sharing and spreading the magnanimous power that music possesses in its ability to touch the hearts and souls that connect with all the beauty that it has to offer. As I emanate this beauty, my revolution will offset and increasingly do away with the racist, sexist, supremacist and elitist corruption that taints the transformative impact that classical music can have on minority musicians around the nation. Against all odds and staggering statistics, with the help of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s Talent Development Program, my family thrived, shattering barriers surrounding a profession that remains out of reach and in some cases off limits to women of color and minority musicians. Music as a tool for social change and spiritual liberation is my purpose, my vision, my revolution.

“separate but equal”

I Want to Be

Shon Thompson to me  12/3/10

Feeling trapped in a fearful world is the magic of life. Everybody feels it. The sense of wonder about how others perceive you is the other side of, how do you see your self. The amazing thing about who you are is that you’ll never know what effect that you have on the universe that you you create. Example, You spend hours writing something that ultimately does not satisfy you, then some one else calls it beautiful. Another, spending too much time in the mirror to put together an image that will be attractive only to be called a whore and admired by degenerates. The truth is, nobody can see themselves, no one has any idea what they look, or sound like. I’ll play something that I hate, just a thing that popped into my head, and then think, well fuck…that was terrible, and then my percussionist will say “wow, what was that, do it again 1,2,3,4…” The way he heard it was from a different world. Everything in life is like that. Your self image does not matter, at all, as long as you continue to grow. The labels that people assign are the only way that they have to try and find out who they (others) really are. They will never know until they give up on labeling. I love Charles Mingus too, Epitaph is my favorite but truly, Charles never even heard it because he wrote it. Miles hated playing with Charles, that knocks me out. If I cook you a plate of food it will taste different to me than for you because I know every ingredient that went into it, and you don’t. Consequently, I don’t enjoy my own food, but everybody else loves it. I cannot surprise myself, only others. Daddy wanted to name Booney, Yusef Lateef, but my mother wouldn’t let him. I leaned how to play Donna Lee years ago, but I can’t play it anymore. I’m not sure about how your renaming yourself has helped you. I don’t think it matters what you do, as long if it helps. I wouldn’t enjoy having a name that made me keep my chops up on a particular piece of work, but I would have to do it, that’s just me. “Oh, Donna Lee…huh?..well Donna Lee, go on ahead and bust it out.” Donna, we are all slaves to our emotions. The reason why a lot of people let it get the best of them is because of the great persona of “cool.” Cool, and style, even flash are important to people who want to be accepted. The bus to work was held up for almost a minute because the guy couldn’t board, his pants were sagging so much that he had complications making the steps. But he was fashionably cool. I was only late to work. About love, your description is the best I’ve heard. It hurts and heals, but it always changes you. When I play my music, nothing else matters for about two days. When I play again, I’m better at it.