I feel strangely exhausted. I finished my first year of graduate school 5 days ago, and I haven't really done anything since, but I'm still so drained. Most of the time, it's a good exhaustion... you know how, after a really excruciating workout, you wake up the next morning and every muscle of your body hurts but in a really good way? That's how I feel emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually right now. Everything hurts after this past year's excruciating workout, but in a good, satisfying way.
I'm not sure how to sum up this year.
Am I a better writer than I was when I got here in September 2009? Yes. 100% yes. It feels really good to be able to say that with such conviction... I'm not sure I could have said it after my first semester, but definitely by the end of the year. I've grown in craft, but the really important part of this year has been becoming much more honest to my experiences, much less conscious of other people's thoughts about my work while I am doing my work, much more comfortable in my voice.
It's also been a process of deconstructing my education, so informed by first British and then American literary traditions, and ask what that means for the understanding of literature that my generation of writers in postcolonial societies has grown up with. In my first school, we could be punished for speaking Hindi; we learned early that English was the language of intellectual work, was somehow more respectable. Although speaking in Hindi would not have been an issue in the school where I did most of my schooling (moved there in 2nd grade), I refused to speak Hindi in school, outside Hindi classes, until my friends in 10th and 11th grade made me do it. I was never sure why I wasn't comfortable speaking this language in school when it was my home language just as much as English was; I guess lessons learned in childhood go a really long way. Now, as I think about writing multilingually, I realize that my diary is naturally multilingual, but the moment i "sit down to write," I switch into English and have a hard time being flexible. Interestingly, though, when we did pure sound and rhythm based exercises in class, I found myself composing in the devnagari script-- it just didn't work in the roman script-- partly because Hindi is more phonetic, but i think also partly because when you reach beyond language into more primal rhythms, then Hindi's rhythms inform me in crucial ways. Now, my program director is strongly encouraging me to do translation work (from Hindi and/ or Spanish) as part of my thesis next year... which sounds like an amazing idea, and feels like a logical next step, but is still incredibly daunting. We'll see.
In the context of those questions and explorations, it's been an interesting journey being the only international student and the only non-white person in my poetry workshops. Even though I've lived in so many different places, somehow I've never really had to think about being a cultural outsider as much as here at SLC, except perhaps in the Catholic University in Argentina. I guess all of those spaces have had enough diversity within them for me to find a home in it; here, being the only one, I've been pushed to think about it in a whole different way. I have also never had to think about race before; this year has shown me that, even if I'm not thinking actively about it, there's no way for me to avoid it while I live in the USA... and has thereby forced me to reflect on how it informs my everyday experiences here. At first, all of that was incredibly unsettling: being surrounded by one specific poetry tradition, hearing a similar voice around me and knowing that that was not my voice, but not really knowing what was my voice. Over time, though, it became a useful exercise: every time I read-- or wrote-- something and knew "that's not how I sound," I was forced to ask myself, "well, then, how do I sound?" A few months ago, my poetry changed incredibly as a result... everything, the content, the structures, the rhythms, the line lengths... and for the first time I felt like I was really hearing my own voice in my work. Other languages I speak, other traditions that speak inside my head, other experiences that are close to my heart, all slowly began to creep into my work.
And, frankly, that scared me.
I don't know if I can explain that fear to someone who doesn't create and think about art on a regular basis... but it was outright scary to hear this raw voice and realize it was my own and then to have to wonder what the other voices were. Not that they are in opposition to each other; the new writing just felt deeper and more gut level than anything that came before, but it's still scary. And the further I'm trying to go down that road, the more scared I am, but also the more excited I am.
Now, I feel I'm "talking like an artist," and that isn't a comfortable feeling either! I don't want to be obscure, and I'm always wary of pompous artist-y talk. But this feels so utterly true in my heart, I'm just going to accept that this is coming from me :)
In that context, I'm curious to see how my writing evolves while I am in Mexico for the summer, utterly away from both English and Hindi, surrounded by Spanish and Nahuatl. Even if I continue to write in English alone, will the rhythms of those other languages creep into my work? I hope so. I can't wait to see.
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