Message to Raw Fiction Participants
by Tanisha Christie, Raw Fiction’s Advisor and Mentor to the Director
January 24, 2015
@ The Brooklyn Public Library Information Commons
I was asked to tell you about being an artist dedicated to making socially conscious art.
Most people will talk about this from the view of what is considered socially conscious. They might immediately talk about our social ills, which you’ll be investigating and discussing in this workshop. It is important that you do. But, I’m going to start from a different place. The Marxist definition of socially conscious is simple: human beings enter into certain productive and/or economic relationships and these relations lead to a form of social consciousness. I recently went to Cuba, and was reminded that I have a different relational perspective than Cubans and others around the world. And within our country, all social consciousness is not the same. It might seem that we have a similar relational experience in broad strokes between each other here, in the United States; but our collective positions of privilege and individual experiences skew our distinct understandings of what one is aware. I’ll say it again, what is considered socially conscious or relevant or important is not agreed upon. A part of an artist’s role is to disrupt and reframe ideologies and the discourse. After all, the personal creative act is political. As we’ve recently witnessed with the attack at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, the human collective politic is not aligned. The artist, as provocateur often walks a fine line when sharing her voice.
And still, our role as artists is to be fearless in showing the breadth of our human experience. To elevate a conversation within his and her own frame of reference. So I’d like to share two areas where the artist can be acutely attuned in order to be more effective practitioners. First, it’s within the artist herself: her identity - however she chooses to claim it.
I was teaching a group of students who did not realize that art is not always only aesthetically driven; that they make work in response to what is happening historically and culturally from their perspective….
I read this quote recently from Jewish/Lesbian writer, scholar, Jill Dolan from her collection of essays Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance she says of her own work:
Unwilling and unable to give up identity, however constructed, positional, and unstable, as a place from which to begin my work - not as an ontologically meaningful home and safe, idealized origin, but as a place of material circumstance that has deeply marked my own embodiments and movements through culture and discourse.
Dolan makes no apologies for who is, or how her work derives from that place (that is not always comfortable). To give up who you are to get to a ‘good’, ‘nice’ story denies yourself (and your audience) the practice of appreciating your aesthetic and exploration of ideas. In this workshop, you’ll be reading James Baldwin who wrote about what he experienced in his life through character. In, Go Tell it on the Mountain the main character struggles between choosing to be like his father or doing something else with his life. Baldwin faced a similar personal struggle. When he was young he became a preacher in his stepfather’s church then left it because it was not what he wanted to do. His personal conflict within the church greatly influenced his writing. He deftly confronts the role of religion in life and culture through the eyes of a teenage boy. He created work from the personal, which informs what we now as the reader see as political. And while Baldwin wrote many personal essays about his experiences, his novels can stand alone in regard to his social consciousness.
A Baldwin quote: “To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”
Your story is fertile ground and valid upon the soil (our history) beneath it. There is no need to go elsewhere for our stories. For some of us, it’s not always clear where to begin or the list of who we are or what we claim might seem very long. Or we might be confused. No matter, emotion and pain of an individual’s perspective or a character, knows no bound. It is from this place, as a reader, we can be moved and brings us into new realms of understanding.
Which brings me to the second area where an artist can focus: the audience, the reader. Who are you talking to? Now this can be tricky, even in the best of circumstances when making an artistic product…I don’t think it’s necessary to create something for everyone. An artist should be mindful of her audience. Now, this is a slippery slope because the creative process should be free to flourish and not hindered by outcome, yet which stories we choose to codify into truth, and whose, and why can be problematic. There are social and culture implications of transmogrifying real life into entertainment commodities; and in Raw Fiction’s case an online entity. Are you writing for working adults, incarcerated youth, your parents? I recently read bell hooks’ article ‘Performance as Practice as a Site of Opposition’ from Let’s Get it On: The Politics of Black Performance. In this article, she writes about black performance as a revolutionary act. I want to bring her voice because she makes a great point about the possible role of the audience in the creative exchange. Paraphrasing a couple of her points in the article, she illuminates that:
…increasingly the commodification of the [performing] arts, which seeks to extend work beyond the power of its immediate and often spontaneous setting, promotes passivity and negates this call for reciprocal engagement…
I love this. Creation and for hooks’ the performative black body isn’t simply creating a ‘marketable commodity but is about creating a liberatory consciousness in disenfranchised people.’
So with that in mind, I ask again, who are you talking to? Who do you want to talk to? How would you like your reader to respond? This is critical, especially within a mediated culture that denigrates the poor, compartmentalizes people of color, praises a commodified culture, creates it’s own terror, glorifies war, is often hateful against women and LBGTQ communities, disrespects our children, fabricates and is laudatory around all things celebrity, where wealth dictates politics, and it’s still acceptable to make fun of difference. Intent is important and it’s not always clear how an audience will respond. And you cannot control how other people receive your work.
Think of the comic Dave Chappelle and his recent performance. He had this conundrum. During a performance, he realized that the white people in his audience might have been laughing at his racial satire for the wrong reasons; in ways that might exacerbate stereotypes about black people in the minds of, well, let’s call them intellectual underachievers. Is this Chappelle’s fault? Is his art, bad or not right? Should he care what people think? He did and walked off stage. I don’t think there is an easy solve here but considering how the message is being received by your audience / reader might shape your craft. It’s something to think about. Bertolt Brecht said that; “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but rather a hammer with which to shape it.”
So while you’re reading and working on your own writing. Think about your truth and take note of your audience. Who do you most want to affect, touch and inspire? The nuance of your story is needed because there is no other you. The world is starving for your point of view. It is your consciousness that’s required to fight the systemic and seemingly pervasive rhetoric around respectability politics and violence in all forms that have no bearing on what is possible in this life. Even within our overachieving, intellectually underachieving, hyper-patriotic, racist, classist, singular-god focused, patriarchal, war-mongering culture; acknowledging truth and telling stories is resistance. And your stories have the power to seek answers to questions about what our society is able to achieve that has yet to be realized. I believe you can create works of art inclusive of everyone and beyond the ills that oppress, moving us toward a liberation we’ve never known.
To be an artist in our culture is not an easy road for most. You have to find a way to get your basics (food, clothes, water, shelter) and have a life in the process (friends, lovers, laughter, the beach, bike rides) whatever it is that brings you joy and gives you space to breathe and fill your creative well. Baldwin found his space in Paris. I hope that Raw Fiction can give you a bit of space to achieve that.
Most people will talk about this from the view of what is considered socially conscious. They might immediately talk about our social ills, which you’ll be investigating and discussing in this workshop. It is important that you do. But, I’m going to start from a different place. The Marxist definition of socially conscious is simple: human beings enter into certain productive and/or economic relationships and these relations lead to a form of social consciousness. I recently went to Cuba, and was reminded that I have a different relational perspective than Cubans and others around the world. And within our country, all social consciousness is not the same. It might seem that we have a similar relational experience in broad strokes between each other here, in the United States; but our collective positions of privilege and individual experiences skew our distinct understandings of what one is aware. I’ll say it again, what is considered socially conscious or relevant or important is not agreed upon. A part of an artist’s role is to disrupt and reframe ideologies and the discourse. After all, the personal creative act is political. As we’ve recently witnessed with the attack at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, the human collective politic is not aligned. The artist, as provocateur often walks a fine line when sharing her voice.
And still, our role as artists is to be fearless in showing the breadth of our human experience. To elevate a conversation within his and her own frame of reference. So I’d like to share two areas where the artist can be acutely attuned in order to be more effective practitioners. First, it’s within the artist herself: her identity - however she chooses to claim it.
I was teaching a group of students who did not realize that art is not always only aesthetically driven; that they make work in response to what is happening historically and culturally from their perspective….
I read this quote recently from Jewish/Lesbian writer, scholar, Jill Dolan from her collection of essays Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance she says of her own work:
Unwilling and unable to give up identity, however constructed, positional, and unstable, as a place from which to begin my work - not as an ontologically meaningful home and safe, idealized origin, but as a place of material circumstance that has deeply marked my own embodiments and movements through culture and discourse.
Dolan makes no apologies for who is, or how her work derives from that place (that is not always comfortable). To give up who you are to get to a ‘good’, ‘nice’ story denies yourself (and your audience) the practice of appreciating your aesthetic and exploration of ideas. In this workshop, you’ll be reading James Baldwin who wrote about what he experienced in his life through character. In, Go Tell it on the Mountain the main character struggles between choosing to be like his father or doing something else with his life. Baldwin faced a similar personal struggle. When he was young he became a preacher in his stepfather’s church then left it because it was not what he wanted to do. His personal conflict within the church greatly influenced his writing. He deftly confronts the role of religion in life and culture through the eyes of a teenage boy. He created work from the personal, which informs what we now as the reader see as political. And while Baldwin wrote many personal essays about his experiences, his novels can stand alone in regard to his social consciousness.
A Baldwin quote: “To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”
Your story is fertile ground and valid upon the soil (our history) beneath it. There is no need to go elsewhere for our stories. For some of us, it’s not always clear where to begin or the list of who we are or what we claim might seem very long. Or we might be confused. No matter, emotion and pain of an individual’s perspective or a character, knows no bound. It is from this place, as a reader, we can be moved and brings us into new realms of understanding.
Which brings me to the second area where an artist can focus: the audience, the reader. Who are you talking to? Now this can be tricky, even in the best of circumstances when making an artistic product…I don’t think it’s necessary to create something for everyone. An artist should be mindful of her audience. Now, this is a slippery slope because the creative process should be free to flourish and not hindered by outcome, yet which stories we choose to codify into truth, and whose, and why can be problematic. There are social and culture implications of transmogrifying real life into entertainment commodities; and in Raw Fiction’s case an online entity. Are you writing for working adults, incarcerated youth, your parents? I recently read bell hooks’ article ‘Performance as Practice as a Site of Opposition’ from Let’s Get it On: The Politics of Black Performance. In this article, she writes about black performance as a revolutionary act. I want to bring her voice because she makes a great point about the possible role of the audience in the creative exchange. Paraphrasing a couple of her points in the article, she illuminates that:
…increasingly the commodification of the [performing] arts, which seeks to extend work beyond the power of its immediate and often spontaneous setting, promotes passivity and negates this call for reciprocal engagement…
I love this. Creation and for hooks’ the performative black body isn’t simply creating a ‘marketable commodity but is about creating a liberatory consciousness in disenfranchised people.’
So with that in mind, I ask again, who are you talking to? Who do you want to talk to? How would you like your reader to respond? This is critical, especially within a mediated culture that denigrates the poor, compartmentalizes people of color, praises a commodified culture, creates it’s own terror, glorifies war, is often hateful against women and LBGTQ communities, disrespects our children, fabricates and is laudatory around all things celebrity, where wealth dictates politics, and it’s still acceptable to make fun of difference. Intent is important and it’s not always clear how an audience will respond. And you cannot control how other people receive your work.
Think of the comic Dave Chappelle and his recent performance. He had this conundrum. During a performance, he realized that the white people in his audience might have been laughing at his racial satire for the wrong reasons; in ways that might exacerbate stereotypes about black people in the minds of, well, let’s call them intellectual underachievers. Is this Chappelle’s fault? Is his art, bad or not right? Should he care what people think? He did and walked off stage. I don’t think there is an easy solve here but considering how the message is being received by your audience / reader might shape your craft. It’s something to think about. Bertolt Brecht said that; “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but rather a hammer with which to shape it.”
So while you’re reading and working on your own writing. Think about your truth and take note of your audience. Who do you most want to affect, touch and inspire? The nuance of your story is needed because there is no other you. The world is starving for your point of view. It is your consciousness that’s required to fight the systemic and seemingly pervasive rhetoric around respectability politics and violence in all forms that have no bearing on what is possible in this life. Even within our overachieving, intellectually underachieving, hyper-patriotic, racist, classist, singular-god focused, patriarchal, war-mongering culture; acknowledging truth and telling stories is resistance. And your stories have the power to seek answers to questions about what our society is able to achieve that has yet to be realized. I believe you can create works of art inclusive of everyone and beyond the ills that oppress, moving us toward a liberation we’ve never known.
To be an artist in our culture is not an easy road for most. You have to find a way to get your basics (food, clothes, water, shelter) and have a life in the process (friends, lovers, laughter, the beach, bike rides) whatever it is that brings you joy and gives you space to breathe and fill your creative well. Baldwin found his space in Paris. I hope that Raw Fiction can give you a bit of space to achieve that.