Short, But Meaningful

In 2007, I decided to send Toure', the author of "Never Drank The Kool-Aid and "Soul City", an email of the craft analysis I wrote for (my Darling) Diana's F&T class. Recently, I was going through some old emails and found what Toure' wrote back to me. Even though his response only consists of a few shabby sentences I think it's cool he actually wrote back.

Nov. 3rd
What I wrote:

Greetings,

A couple of semesters ago I read your collection of essays, "Never Drank The Kool-Aid" for a Form & Technique class in prose. The book was "dope" as the cool kids say. The essay about you fearing for yr life with Suge Knight was hilarious.

Anyway, I wanted to show you my craft analysis for the book with an emphasis on the essay "What's Inside Us Brotha." I love this one. I think it's important for you to see what an actual student thought of your work, yo. Enjoy--I hope.

A. K. Cole
Form & Technique
Diana Joseph 102606

Toure' – "What’s Inside Us, Brotha?" In his collection of essays, Never Drank the Kool-Aid, Toure—our modern day griot of Hip-Hop, our oral historian of an infectious culture that literally set both east and west coasts on fire in the early 80’s, when some dope rhymes over fly beats not only rocked the house, but banks accounts alike. The beginning years of this culture has always been a bit shady for me because I was an 80s baby, so at age five I didn’t know what Run-DMC meant when they said “It's Tricky to rock a rhyme, to rock a rhyme that's right on time—It's Tricky...it's Tricky (Tricky) Tricky (Tricky),” but I knew I liked it, and when my cousins would bust cardboard boxes down in the funeral home parking lot, and break-dance to “Crush groovin-body-movin,” I didn’t know how to do those moves, but I felt some sort of delicious-attraction. At that tender age, I knew 80s Hiphop had that energy that kept my ear to the speaker, and my eyes glued to the breakers contorting limbs.

In this collection of profiles and reflective essays, Toure gives readers a huge slice of Hiphop pie by examining these famed artists to uncover their true-self beyond their public persona. In the introduction, he explains the importance of listening to subjects in order to get them to tell him things he wouldn’t have thought to ask. The one thing he didn’t ask his subjects directly was the one thing they told him indirectly, by expressing the hunger, need and conviction of their life-stories—their “What’s Inside You(s), Brotha?” Toure struggled with this question and fought with himself to answer it. As a reader, this question speaks volumes because it challenges everything I thought I knew about myself.

In this essay, Toure lays himself on the chopping block for a decapitation of his three heads—you, I (me), and he. His reaction to this question, and the way he structured this essay to answer it is unique to him, but the stories of Biggie, Pac, 50, DMX, and even Caushun revealed their story, which is largely responsible for the art they create, created. The boxing metaphor in this essay reinforces Toure’s choice to write with shifting point of views. Here he’s fighting with the punching bag, Jack, past experiences that include a physical fight and mental regrets, and himself. The rotating P.O.V.’s, as a literary technique, allows Toure to see himself from the outside and inside, simultaneously during the fight. On a more global level, this question allows readers (if they really are reading) to examine themselves to find the source of what is driving them; what is making their yearning for public recognition, or familial recognition like fire in their loins. Like Toure, I hesitated to ask myself this question because I was afraid of what the answer would be, and I should have been—we all should be scared when seriously dissecting ourselves for the truth. This question is bigger than the obvious, I am Black, I am White, Woman, or Male—it’s about where you come from that made, and is constantly making you who you are.

You ache with the need to convince yourself
that you do exist in the real world
that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish,
and you strike out with your fists,
you curse and you swear
to make them recognize you.
-from Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison"

Nov. 23rd
What Toure' wrote back to me:
Thank you for sending that and for carefully reading my book! That was so nice.

Luke, This Wag is for You

I was thinking of something clever to say to you. Something that wouldn't necessarily sting your soul, but some words that will bring your finger wagging to a complete hault. I don't accept your finger wag, sir--not one bit. I didn't submit to the send out party because I didn't feel like it. I'm really in no rush to submit anything right now. And anyway, a better idea would have been to announce this let's-all-get published event at the beginning of November rather than the middle-to-the-end of the month.

Even though you wrote you results of the challenge weeks ago, I'm responding to you today because I dance to the beat of my own drum (when I feel like it). So if you won't retract the wag, I will because I'm just that cool.

On a lighter note, will you be in Chicago for AWP?

The Biggest Fight I Ever Had

Well actually I'm still having it--this fight between the novel and me. All this morning on the bus listening to songs that filled the space around my head, I was fighting. Fighting with the idea of putting my fingers on the keyboard to type. This story inside me is fighting to get out, but I continue to think/say/feel--I can't let 'you' out. Like a spirit child that travels from generation to generation trying to be born, this novel is trying to get out of me, but I won't let it.

Maybe it's fear of failing or succeeding or not getting past the first page. Maybe it's the idea of breaking the lazy pattern my life has grown accustomed to. Maybe it's something I haven't thought of yet.

Whatever it is I know the story inside of me won't rest until it's out (damn you spirit of storytelling--you're like a hog weighing on my back, but I love you--you're like a needle in a haystack I can't find, but I need you--you're like a cute man with a cocked-eye, but I can't stop looking at you--you're like everything in this world that I need, love, want but I misuse you so.)

I Like The Part About Finding YOur Own Way

Letters to a Young Writer
In our Letters to a Young Writer series, Narrative’s featured authors respond to comments and questions from younger authors reflecting on the nature of the writer’s work. We inaugurate this series with a correspondence between Dennis O’Reilly and T. Corghessan Boyle:

Dear T. C. Boyle,
No one can accuse you of shying away from the most onerous issues of our time. Perhaps that’s why I’m reluctant to take Ty Tierwater at his word when he says, “I’m not preaching. I’m not going to preach. It’s too late for that.”

In a culture in which the presentation of all opinions has all but eliminated rational discourse, would you encourage young writers concerned with the problems our society faces to lay it all on the line, as you have done? Or is it too late for that?
Thank you for your time—and your work.

Best regards,
Dennis Thomas O’Reilly

Dear Dennis:

I wouldn’t want people to throw in the towel after reading A Friend of the Earth. Certainly Friend is not a book of advocacy (in fact, when I came back from that particular book tour to access my website, I was amazed to find that people there were debating whether or not I was an environmentalist), because advocacy and fiction do not comfortably coexist, though my sympathies should be clear to anyone who has read even a handful of my stories or novels. Not a single environmentalist holds out much hope for the future of our species or of the myriad other endangered species out there, given our overpopulation and destruction of the environment, the zero-sum game of capitalism that posits infinite product and infinite consumers, and our unsustainable lifestyle. The crash is coming. You’d have to be blind not to see that.

So what do we do? I am socially engaged, unlike many of my contemporaries, and I take on a whole variety of issues, yes, but increasingly I have found myself coming back to the central one of the environment, and, by extension, the meaning of our lives in the face of an indifferent universe. How and why do we master the other species? How long will our tenure be? Why have we evolved the power to contemplate our own future? Why do we exist? Why does anything exist? I write fiction in order to think deeply and to assuage my fear and my pessimism through the act of creating art. This is redemptive. And while I have no advice for any artist, young or old, other than to find his or her own way, I will say that each of us must create art in order to address the central questions of human existence—for our own sanity, and, we hope, for the sanity of our readers. (I Like this part).

Buena suerte,
T. C. Boyle

We're Living This Moment

All I have to say is God is moving this nation towards a change that I can believe in. It's true that America can change and it is. With all this joy and fair tidings, I know that this America we're moving towards won't appear over night--it will take some and I'm willing to wait and work and make the sacrifices necessary. It brings me exceeding happiness to know that my five year-old niece will know a different America than myself, as I will know a different one than my mother.

It's a good day to be black, white, asian, hispanic, native--united in America. In 77 days I will know how it feels to be represented in the highest office in this country. In 77 days my nine year-old twins cousins will have living proof that nothing is impossible--not even becoming president of the United States. We made history.

Do Not Mind the Bombs

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I N B E LGI U M , I remember
they called this day White Monday. Belgium was my
home when I was learning words like God
and doubt and faith. Belgium was my home
when I entered the country called Man. There,
in that land where I’d learned to fall in love
with learning, winter always stayed and stayed,
the days too dark, the rains incessant, pounding,
pounding—and all the sleepers dreamed of sun
and shirtless days. Shirtless, shoeless days.
I remember: trains, leaves, trees. Remember
too that aging, tired woman who’d told me why
the trees grew straight and tall in rows
in Belgium’s rain-soaked earth.
I remember what she’d said: “The trees,
we planted them in rows. When the war
was fi nally won.” I pictured her young,
a handsome husband at her side. At last the war
was done! At last! And before they planted crops,
they planted trees—the trees the war had stolen
from the earth. “What the bombs had not destroyed,
we chopped for fuel. Their stumps and branches
gave us warmth. The land was bare and spent.
The earth, it reeked of guns and blood and rotting
fl esh. And so we planted trees. And as we worked
we found reminders of the war. A rifl e, empty
shells, the remains of a man, a bullet through
his chest, his uniform turning to dust. We called
the priest and blessed the bones. A boy! I knew
he’d been a boy. Belgian, English, French! Bah!
He was a boy! I cried that night for all
the world had lost—then woke and fi nished
planting. And through the years, we watched
the growing trees. Before my mother died, she went
from tree to tree, kissing leaves and branches.
‘Have you gone mad?’ I yelled. And she screamed
back: ‘I am, at last, in love!’ She smelled of leaves
and bark the night she breathed her last. The day I buried
her, I leaned against a tree and wept. I swear, I swear
I smelled her breath as I leaned against that tree.”
Today, I hear that woman’s voice as I
read the morning news—the news of bombs,
of all the deaths, Americans, Iraqis, children, women,
men. Dead. Like π the blood and bodies
run into infi nity. I walk outside, the sky as clear
as simple boyhood words mamá, papá, y agua. Oh
for a day when this would be my only task—to sit
and memorize the blueness of a sky.
Better now to study
trees that grow on desert sands than to study war.
So I begin to count the leaves on limbs
of waking trees. I know that wars are raging
everywhere. Even in my heart. Do not mind
the bombs. Do not mind them, not today.
I wander through my yard,
examining the plants. I lost some to the freeze—but
most survived. I touch and kiss the tender leaves
and speak to them, half lost, half crazed,
and half expecting trees and plants
and shrubs to kiss me back. Perhaps, today,
they’ll kiss me back. I touch a desert bush—yellow
fl owers bursting like a fl ame, spring’s fi rst blaze
of light. The dog running up and down and up
and down the yard, then rolling on the grass
to scratch her back. I laugh and speak
to her. The wars are everywhere. I’ll plant
another tree. Something to survive the torture
of the sun. Something to withstand a thousand
years of drought.
I touch a tree I planted
years ago. I touch and touch. Oh, do not mind
the bombs today. Kiss me, kiss me back.

From Dreaming the End of War

Sorry, No Maxwelling For Me

So disappointed. He's coming to Chicago, and I didn't hear anything about it. Tickets have been on sale since last month. And I didn't hear anything about it. Damn it! I like love this guy.