ABSTRACT BLEACH ME As an African-American
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ABSTRACT BLEACH ME As an African-American child growing up in the South, I have lived and moved among white society for so long that I wear them as a second coat, a second skin even. Growing up, white wasn’t just a language to learn, it was a whole dominant culture to embrace while living in an opposing and arguably reactionary culture. This collection of essays is centered on identity; questioning, defining, and engaging with an intentionally misplaced identity. Identity-- affecting, reshaping, abusing, and refocusing that identity-- is always “what’s at stake,” when one transverses their history and others histories and stories. This collection, then, is centered on the ideas of “code switching” and “double consciousness,” taking the theories to a space where they’ve become an actual identity, have become the only stable sense of self I own. Because this collection is, at its core, about ownership, about owning your own problems, bridging and integrating your own experiences within a collective and intentional creating and understanding your individual-self outside the collective. Kimberly Susan Crews May 2012 BLEACH ME by Kimberly Susan Crews A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in the College of Arts and Humanities California State University, Fresno May 2012 APPROVED For the Department of English: We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the university and the student’s graduate degree program for the awarding of the master’s degree. Kimberly Susan Crews Thesis Author Steven Church (Chair) English Alex Espinosa English Marnel Niles Communication For the University Graduate Committee: Dean, Division of Graduate Studies AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION OF MASTER’S THESIS I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in its entirety without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of authorship. X Permission to reproduce this thesis in part or in its entirety must be obtained from me. Signature of thesis author: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To a support system who loved me when I refused to love myself, who saw something worthwhile in me, who allowed me to walk my own path and jazz step to my own music; who slapped my “no’s” with “yes’s”---I love you, I thank you: Johnnie, Jesse, Jeston. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page PREFACE .......................................................................................................................... 1 BLACK BUFFER ............................................................................................................... 4 THE BLEACHER GIRLS ................................................................................................. 7 INDEPENDENT SHADOW ......................................................................................... 18 FIRST CLASS .................................................................................................................. 29 FAN(ANTICS) ................................................................................................................ 39 LETTER TO MY DAUGHTER ..................................................................................... 45 LIST, LETTERS, AND NOTES: A MARRIAGE ......................................................... 56 FORGED LINKS ............................................................................................................. 69 ON BEING A CHAIR .................................................................................................... 81 ON BEING A SHOE: A MEDITATION ...................................................................... 84 CONSEQUENCES OF APRIL ...................................................................................... 93 PAYING FOR A PLOT ................................................................................................ 109 DRESSING FOR THE HOSPITAL ............................................................................. 119 HIS EYES ....................................................................................................................... 129 PREFACE I’ve lived years without a true sense of identity. I am a chameleon. I have successfully skirted the ultimatum to define who you are from both black and white society. I slipped quietly into groups, movements, cultures, and classrooms, adapting to whatever role I needed to play. Life, as of now, is about survival, living only in shutter speeds and picture frames, living in moments. My chameleon self is an expression of survival, which by the end of the collection, I find I do well. At the age of twenty-five I listen more than I should. You would think by this age I’d have gathered enough intel. on life to wing my way into adult conversations and argue theories and reshape our political atmosphere behind a classroom desk. I do, in fact, speak my mind on occasion, but there is always a double filter present. Most times I am content to sit back and observe and learn and take pieces of others and reshape those parts to fit me. Sometimes I feel as if I were a schizophrenic Marionette Doll, just waiting to see who will pull my strings and what talk I’d talk and thoughts I’d think. And at other times I feel like a new age robot, becoming sentient as I gathered these survival tools from my own stories and observations, from the stories of my family, from social interactions and reactions with varying strands of stimuli, stringing the experiences together in an evolving collage of “me,” whatever that being develops into. As an African-American child growing up in the South, I have lived and moved among white society for so long that I wear them as a second coat, a second skin even. Growing up, white wasn’t just a language to learn, it was a whole dominant culture to embrace while living in an opposing and arguably reactionary culture. The older women of my culture, as they watched me flip 2 2 through a teenie bopper magazine while trying to twirl my short, wool-like hair, wearing a Senegal inspired dashiki to church, used to say, “The negro in that child don’t know what to do.” And they were right. W.E.B. DuBois called this “double consciousness”, where one’s self- consciousness is continually filtered through another’s point of view, through another’s identity. “Code switching” is another relatable term. “Code switching” is defined in its name. It is the ability to switch back and forward linguistically, using various languages, or social switching-- the ability to act first to a predicted reaction from a person of a dominant group. This is what I know. This collection is centered on the ideas of “code switching” and “double consciousness,” taking the theories to a space where they’ve become an actual identity, have become the only stable sense of self I own. Because this collection is, at its core, about ownership, about owning your own problems, bridging and integrating your own experiences within a collective. This collection is fragmented. Imagine a once there but now broken link in a circular chain. Who will fix the link? Will you fix it with another piece of metal, or plastic, or string? Will you step in and become a physical link tying both sides together? There are so many choices, decisions, and half realized problem solving ideas but at the beginning, the purpose is not about the fix, but rather the rush of creation and the sensation of journey. This is about the pieces of information and perspectives and advice given to me to reevaluate constantly who I am and catalogue the attempt to conjure a socially acceptable and presentable identity. Is this book about survival? Yes. Is this book about feeling manufactured, feeling as if you were born to be an informant, or a translator for two dominant color cultures in America? Yes, definitely. Is this about family and relationships? Yes. This collection, then, is about my relationship with identity through different 3 3 stories, different people, and different moments in my life that have shaped that identity, allowing me to tell a story and work through a theory, a theory that will allow me to exist wholly or grant me some kind of peace to play the part I was given, and to play it well. BLACK BUFFER My summation of my own personal identity grew out of a beach analogy. Imagine, if you would, the sea at night. The waves during the day are a multi- hued shimmer of blue. At night, a dark inky blackness. The waves would back up and up and up, preparing to launch themselves at the barrier of land in front of it, knowing that the universe aligned only in a few, brief, moments in time where the impossibility of making shore is in reach. So for years, for generations the dark seas brushed up against the sand mass and waited. When the time came, the dark waves rushed into the sand. The theory of coming ashore fell between peaceful movements and a militant movement. Some of the waves crashed violently into the sands defensive boarders, breaking down, breaking into the barrier lines. The white sand dunes, aggressively huge with dilapidated cones on top of their heads, could only hold back the tide for so long until the lines blurred between what was sea and what was beach. The white beach tired an equal separation with the black sea, but the oxymoron was moronic. With feverish determination, the waves bashed without pause. Then the sea