Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor

There is a gaze that women who write seem to have.

The gaze is unblinking, wide, connected, and steady.

It’s not narrow, very probing and it does not flinch as it bears witness.

It doesn’t have funny axes to grind.

Only looking for you to say Amen.

When it’s time, it will amaze.

Water has perfect memory and as a thing, it is forever rushing back to that memory, no matter where it finds itself. The same also for writers. Our number 1 obligation is to remember. Not necessarily to organize, or even transmit knowledge at times, or even solve all problems, but simply to remember. The spaces of struggle, those of fire, anything in between, change that is constant or the end that should be the beginning. All of this allows me to move beyond a monolithic prescription of what it means to live a certain way or do things a certain way, to simply do it my way since I am the only one. Its for this reason, I write everyday.

Sometimes to change the world, because why not. Other times to make sense of this messy world we find ourselves in. That and the fact that humans are quite interesting beings. So I am committed to dwelling on all things that make us interesting, those hidden, and those that keep us on our feet. I am in the process of reconstructing a very recent memory and its context. What did I mean when I did this or that? And what is the difference when this or that occurred. Re-mem-bering is a very active process, one where I find myself literally putting aspects of an experience back together as if I was working on putting body parts together.

Language, including poetry, like the one above inspired by Toni Morrison, is helping me to form connections, so much so that when I think I have found a rhythm, I am taken to a completely different direction, that is neither passive nor disengaged. The fact that these memories come in waves keeps me alert as the heartbeat on what it means to be systematically annihilated in many ways, often without care in a system that would rather you stay silent. So much so that the job of our survival, even through silence, the job of our resilience, the job of our struggles, our healing, our recovery, our transformation, our joy, our persistence, the job too of our excellence, is ours and only ours as stories to tell. This is a serious responsibility, one that I hope to carry out now that I find myself in a Renaissance of sorts, a space where dreams are the highest point of my life.